Jane Devine: There is no such thing as a safe amount of booze when driving, so let’s set the limit at zero

ONE for the road? It’s not a very responsible thing to ask a driver, is it? Yet many of us set ourselves a limit of “just the one” if we’re driving.

In a way, the drink-driving limit encourages this. We all roughly know what we can drink without driving illegally, and that can encourage us into a false sense of security, believing that we really can drive safely on just one glass of wine or just one pint of beer because we’re “under the limit”.

It’s not really the point though, is it? The drink driving limit isn’t there to abdicate us of our own personal responsibility. It is there to set clear guidelines for the imposition of penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol. But this system does, in my view, create a belief in drivers that up to the agreed limit of alcohol, they are safe to drive. Of course they’re not. We all know that alcohol can affect us differently at different times: it is not just the amount of alcohol you drink that makes you drunk, it depends on loads of other factors, including what you’ve eaten, your age, gender, and weight, what your metabolic rate is and how your stress levels are.

The fact is, we need a system which stops people from driving when they are actually not safe to do so, not just when they are technically not safe to do so. There are around 40 deaths and 170 serious injuries from drink-driving incidents in Scotland each year. Setting blood alcohol limits has been the way we have discouraged people from drinking and driving so far, but given that there remains a clear link between drink-driving and serious and fatal road crashes, maybe it’s time to get radical.

The Scottish Government is bringing forward legislation to reduce the drink drive limit in Scotland, which at the moment is the most lenient in the world. That’s just not radical enough.

We should scrap the drink drive limit altogether. There should be no limit under which you are safe to drive. If you are found to be driving and have alcohol in your bloodstream, or for that matter have been influenced by any other factors that can impair your ability to drive (drugs, tiredness, distraction) then we should impose severe, even draconian penalties: life-time driving bans and custodial sentences.

Having any drink drive limit encourages us to believe that it is safe to drink a certain amount and drive and it allows drivers to shirk their responsibility, relying on a limit, not their own judgment. Neither of these actions is helpful, yet the system we currently have encourages them. The only way to reduce drink driving is to make people more responsible. The only way to make people more responsible is to give them nothing to hide behind and everything to lose.

We all know it is safer to have nothing. The government’s own advice is that there is no safe amount. So, how about “none for the road”?