The Source of the DWI [driving while intoxicated] laws

Not one single American scientists, nor mathematician, nor even student, teacher, politician, nor bureaucrat, has even taken the time to critique the methodology used to justify the "DWI" [read: driving while intoxicated] laws.  If even one competent mathematicain had, government and "we the people" would have noted the serious methodological flaws on which these fraudulent laws are based and done something to PREVENT that draconian laws that followed.

The flaws are so glaring and so obvious and so egregious that it should be an embarassment to each and every honest, concerned American citizen.

There are three studies which are referenced when governments attempt to justify these draconian DWI laws:

	The Borkenstein study.
	The "H.P. Kr�ger" study.
	The Perrine study.

All three studies contain serious methodological flaws similar if not identical to the following:

	SAMPLING DEMOGRAPHICS: "Field operations were conducted on Friday and Saturday nights during two two-hour periods at separate sites, at one site between 10 PM and midnight, and at the other between 1 AM and 3 AM. Data from the 96NRS is representative only of locations and periods when drinking and driving is most prevalent (i.e., not all times or roadways in the 48 contiguous states)."
	ACCIDENT RISK BIAS:  The methodology used to assess accident risk under-represents the expected accident rates of each BAC class.
	DISQUALIFIED CONTROL GROUP:   Key drivers from the control group were excluded from the results, even though including them may have almost doubled the number of drivers with a BAC > 0.
	CONTROL GROUP BIAS:   No reason was given for removing another 85 drivers from the control group, who may have been another 14% of the drivers with a BAC > 0.
	REPORT BIAS:  To determine who was the cause of the accident, they all relied on police who have been trained that drinking alcohol automatically presumes guilt.
	LOGICAL ERROR:   All three almost ignored the most important fact about their study group:  the SAFEST drivers were drivers with a BAC > 0 and < 0.8, which even their own data showed to be 89.8% of all drivers with a BAC > 0.
	DROWSY DRIVING: None of these studies took into account "drowsy driving", which the NHTSA estimates could account for 11% of night time accidents.  This alone could cause even more accidents than are attributed to drivers with a BAC between .18 to .20 and .20 and above, combined.
	SEX BIAS:  None of the studies considered the sex of the driver, even though numerous statistics show that women drivers are 3 times more likely than men drivers and women pilots are four times more likely than men pilots, to cause an accident.
	ADVOCACY GROUP:   With such obvious advocacy work, the composition of this control group could easily have been manipulated in ways that weren't even reported.

SAMPLING DEMOGRAPHICS

It's impossible to know what effect drinking and driving has on accident rates if a complete data set for ALL times of the day and night, all driving conditions, and all other pertinent factors, is not known.   By excluding drivers who may have been "intoxicated" at 7 am in the morning (by their definition of the word "intoxicated"),  it's impossible to detect accidents that may have been alcohol related at other times of the day.  By excluding these other potential "alcohol related accidents", it's mathematically impossible to get a complete and unbiased result for the sample they studied.  This failure alone disqualifies any opinion that might be issued by scientists who conduct such studies.

For example, if the FAA is correct and it takes up to three hours to metabolize just one ounce of alcohol, then there could be numerous drivers who had just four drinks close to midnight on a week night, got up and drove on the highways at 7 AM on the way to work, only 7 hours later, but would still be "intoxicated" by their definition, because they could still have up to two ounces of alcohol in their system.  Some drivers could still have as many as two ounces of alcohol in their system at this time of the morning, and if alcohol causes accidents, then before any determination can be made about how many accidents are caused by drinking drivers on weekends and week nights, we also need to know how many accidents were caused by such drivers at 7 AM in the morning.

ACCIDENT RISK BIAS

Kruger's study estimated that the "accident risk" of drivers with a BAC between.02 and .04 should have resulted in 30 fatal accidents, which is 9 accidents less than their actual number of 21 accidents, indicating that the odds ratio for such drivers was 0.7 (or that they were 30% less likely than the average to cause an accident).  This is consistent with the "Borkenstein dip" reported in the US.  But drivers with this BAC level were 1.71% of the control group, so they should have been 1.71% of the 1,968 drivers in accidents (or 34) included in this study.  The fact that only 21 of the drivers in this BAC class were involved in the accidents indicates that their odds ratio was actually .62, meaning that they were 38% less likely than average to cause an accident.

This bias caused the following errors:

In other words, where we would expect the odds ratio for drivers in the .04 to .06 class to be .93 (where they would be 7% less likely than average to cause an accident), Kruger predicted that their odds ratio would be 1.08 (where they would be 8% MORE likely to cause an accident).

DISQUALIFIED CONTROL GROUP

Kruger reports that "Of those asked for a breath sample, 9128 (94.8%) agreed".  BUT ONLY 6.3% OF THE DRIVERS HAD A BAC > 0!  It's far more significant that 5.2% of nighttime drivers would refuse to take a breath sample requested by the police than it is that 6.3% had a BAC > 0.  But this point was entirely ignored.  The opportunity existed to determine exactly what percentage of those who refused to take the test were actually intoxicated, but this opportunity was missed, thus it's now impossible to know with certainty what percentage of them had a BAC > 0.  But it's entirely possible that all of them did, which would have almost doubled the percentage of drivers in the control group with a BAC > 0, from 6.3% to 11.5%.  In addition, most likely due to CONTROL GROUP BIAS, another 85 drivers were omitted from the control group with no explanation.  It's entirely possible that they too had a BAC > 0, which would have increased the percent of drivers in the control group with a BAC > 0 by 14%.   This would mean that the percent of drivers in the control group with a BAC > 0 could actually have been 12.4% rather than only 6.3%, which completely invalidates the control group.

The use of such a disqualified control group can never be justified.  The only way to salvage anything from this "study" is to make some wild assumptions about the BAC levels of those who refused the breath test.  What they SHOULD have done is a min and a max using the known data, and making several assumptions about the distribution of the BAC levels.  For example, if it's assumed that the distribution of the unknown 5.2% and the unknown 0.9% was similar to the known distribution of the 6.3%, then drivers with a BAC between 0 and 0.02 would be 50% less likely to have an accident than a non-drinking driver, rather than only 4% less likely as reported by Kruger.  Similarly, drivers with BAC between 0.02 and .04 would be 64% rather than 30% less likely to have an accident, and drivers with BAC between .04 and .06 would be 46% less likely rather than 5% more likely to.

It doesn't make any sense, though, that drinking one drink and having a BAC between 0.02 and 0.04 would decrease your likelihood of having an accident by 64%, though.  This might put such drivers into Mario Andretti's class, and it's not likely that drinking alcohol is THAT beneficial.   Thus a more reasonable assumption would be that those who refused the test tended to be the drivers with the higher BAC levels, including those with a BAC > .20.   It should be noted that the use of this biased control group resulted in the prediction that only 2 drivers with a BAC > .20 should have been involved in fatal accidents, compared to the actual number of accidents of 64.  This is what caused the scientists to state that such drivers had 62 more accidents than they should have, making them 31 times more dangerous than non-drinking drivers.  But if only 62 or 12.4% of these 501 drivers who refused the test had a BAC > .20, then they would NOT have been over-represented in fatal accidents at all.

This would drive the conscientious scientist to make some astute assumptions about the potential bias in the way the data was collected, managed, and presented.  It would make him suspicious of this obvious advocacy work, which should lead him to presume that the media hype about drinking and driving may be what encouraged these German scientists to use such a faulty control group in the first place.  It should make him consider the possibility that, of the 9,629 drivers who were reported to be in the control group, 8,438 or 87.6% of them had a BAC = 0 just as reported, whereas 1,191 or 12.4% of them had a BAC > 0 but almost   half of them were omitted for political reasons.

REPORT BIAS

Police, judges, lawyers, and many other public servants are continuously indoctrinated about the "fact" that drinking and driving causes accidents, so to depend on them to provide an unbiased assessment of who was responsible for an accident when drinking and driving is involved is to ask them to fulfill their own prophecy.  They have were not asked to determine which drivers might have been affected by drowsy driving, which by itself could be a complete explanation for the extra 62 drivers with a BAC greater than 0.2 who were involved in fatal accidents.  As Kruger notes, this study included only the drivers who police determined CAUSED an accident, who were a 28% subset of all the drivers, which means that these extra 62 drinking drivers were only 0.9% of all the drivers in accidents.

It's entirely possible that this bias alone was at least 0.9%, which would be a complete explanation for the high visibility of drinking drivers.

LOGICAL ERROR

By failing to consider, explain, or carefully evaluate all of the reasons that drivers with a BAC between 0 and 0.04 were much safer drivers than average, and by failing to make the point that they were almost 90% of all the drivers in their Roadside Survey, they proved how biased they intended to make this report.  By doing so, they failed to estimate how many lives would be saved if ALL drivers had the safety record of these moderately drinking drivers.  A detailed breakdown of their own Roadside Survey, coupled with their own biased police reported data, produces the following safety record:

Where Kruger reports that drivers with a BAC between  0.04 and 0.06 were 8% more likely to have a fatal accident, it's entirely possible that his control group was so biased that they were actually 50% less likely to have an accident.  Where he estimates that drivers with a BAC between 0 and 0.08 were 53% more likely to have an accident, it's entirely possible that they're actually 25% LESS likely to have an accident.

To base massive, costly, draconian laws on such a logical error is a crime of humongous proportions.  The potential to REDUCE traffic fatalities by a mere 25% in this country is the potential to save 10,500 lives per year, which is a FAR, FAR bigger number than they CLAIM that these laws saved. 

But their own data proves that these laws did NOT save any lives.  Their major effect was to reduce the number of drivers with a BAC between  0 and 0.08, who were 90% of all the drivers with a BAC greater than 0,  who would have been an average of 25% less likely to have a fatal accident.

DROWSY DRIVING

Because "Field operations were conducted on Friday and Saturday nights during two two-hour periods at separate sites, at one site between 10 PM and midnight, and at the other between 1 AM and 3 AM. Data from the 96NRS is representative only of locations and periods when drinking and driving is most prevalent (i.e., not all times or roadways in the 48 contiguous states)", NHTSA itself knows that drowsy driving would have been a significant factor in these accidents, but this factor was not even mentioned in any of the three studies.  This alone disqualifies any speculation made by the scientists who conducted these studies.

SEX BIAS

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that women are dangerous drivers, so to ignore this factor introduces the greatest bias into the studies.  Anyone who has witnessed them from the right seat of a car, or from the right seat as they almost got run over by a woman driver, senses that they're far more dangerous than men drivers.  But rocket scientists and even feminists have made the statistical analyses and concluded that women are three to four times more likely to have accidents than men, which makes them more dangerous than all drivers with a BAC greater than 0 and less than 0.08.  If the DWI data were to be broken down by sex, it's inevitible that women drivers would be over-represented as drivers with a BAC greater than 0 who were in accidents, which would reduce the probability that men drivers who drink will have an accident even further.

Copyright @ 2010 by Fathers' Manifesto & Christian Party