With March 16 to 22 being National Impaired Driving Prevention Week, I’ve been thinking about the people I knew who died from being hit by a drunk driver or driving impaired themselves. It’s never an easy thing to live with, wondering if they’d still be alive today had someone not got behind the driver’s wheel.
For Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) president Tanya Hansen Pratt, the topic is personal. Her mother, Beryl, was killed by an impaired driver in 1999.
A strong advocate for raising awareness, Pratt said preventing impaired driving starts with each of us making responsible choices and that everyone has a role to play.
“Whether it is planning a sober ride home, speaking up when we see someone we believe is driving impaired, or supporting policies that keep our roads safe.”
I regularly enjoy picking up bottles for charity when I’m out walking and nine out of 10 of the bottles or cans I pick up are from alcohol. I see them on the road, in the ditch or tossed onto the bank by drivers heading to and from home in the part of Williams Lake where I live.
I would like to give people the benefit of the doubt and hope it was only one drink they were having, but when I see three cans in a row of the same beverage spread out over a few 100 feet, my suspicious nature wonders otherwise.
Many people are also driving under the influence of cannabis, more since it became legal to consume it. I see packages on the side of the road and often can smell marijuana from vehicles that pass me on streets and highways.
So yes, driving under the influence has not stopped and MADD says while strides have been made, impaired driving is still one of the leading causes of criminal death in Canada.
Statistics show that every year, 100s of people are killed, and 1,000s are injured in alcohol- and drug-related crashes.
An average of nine federal criminal charges and provincial short-term licence suspensions are laid for impaired driving every single hour in Canada. Each impaired driving incident represents real lives impacted—families shattered by preventable tragedies that cost billions of dollars to society every year.
Wow. That is crazy.
Here’s hoping we can keep those statistics at nil in the Cariboo-Chilcotin.
