At The End Of The Day, We're Not Japan

There are a lot of wonderful things about Japan.  The culture, the food, the technology, the games, the general lack of street crime and violence, and so on are all great.  But at the same time, there are some things about Japan that would absolutely NEVER fly in America, and for very good reason.

Take their extremely strict (even by global standards, not just by American standards!) approach to DUI, for example:

• The BAC limit for driving is a mere 0.03%, where as little as ONE standard drink will almost certainly put you over the limit for at least an hour or two (effectively zero tolerance).  For ALL ages, period.
• Penalties can range from up to three years in prison, a $5000 fine, and losing one's license for at least three months (which wouldn't matter if one is locked up for three years).  And you will almost certainly lose your job as well.  Again, for as little as ONE drink before driving.  OUCH!
• And if you have the audacity to exceed 0.04% when driving, which translates to one or at most two standard drinks in a couple hours or so (depending on body weight, gender, time, pace of drinking, food, etc.), it gets even worse still:  five years in prison, a $10,000 fine, and cancellation of one's license altogether.  DOUBLE OUCH!
• Above that second threshold, though, there are no further graduated penalties at the margin:  driving after one or two drinks is treated the same as driving after ten.
• But wait, there's more!  As if that wasn't bad enough, it's NOT only the driver who is on the hook for such harsh penalties.  Anyone who allows someone to get behind the wheel after drinking even ONE drink, including the passengers and anyone who served the driver, such as in restaurants and bars, and anyone who provided a vehicle to the driver, will also face roughly the same penalties.  It is collective responsibility taken to the extreme, basically.
• Oh, and this also applies to bicycle riders as well, by the way.  (But hey, at least they don't apply it to pedestrians though, as there are no laws against drunk walking or public drunkenness there.)
• And this is all very strictly enforced, of course.

In a word, WOW!  They are so strict that bars and restaurants will simply not let you order even ONE beer unless they confirm with you first that you will not be driving home.  They even have "skipper" taxi services for hire with two drivers:  one to drive your vehicle home, and one to pick up the first driver afterwards.  (Or sometimes just one driver with an e-bike to ride themself back, and then onto the next customer.) And the popularity of non-alcoholic beers and wines has predictably skyrocketed in Japan since these laws were passed in 2002 and 2007.  

And yes, it is true that Japan saw alcohol-related traffic fatalities drop by over half instantly, and by up to 80 percent over the next few years following the passage of these super-strict laws.  Significant decreases in such casualties were seen after each of both the 2002 (i.e. lowering the BAC limit from 0.05% to 0.03%) and 2007 (penalties for passengers, servers, and vehicle lenders) law changes, and both also involved a great stiffening of DUI penalties in general, as opposed to merely making the law harder to satisfy.  So on its own terms, it seems to have worked wonders, at least on the surface.  But at what cost, really?  

Baby, meet bathwater, basically.

Try to implement such a draconian law over here in the USA today, especially the part about punishing servers and passengers, and the very best you could hope for in terms of unintended consequences in our culture would be a deep-freeze chilling effect on what is left of in-person socialization, and it goes downhill from there.  

In any case, such a law is WAY outside of the Overton window for an individualistic society (not to mention a car culture with vast rural areas!) like the USA, so the odds of this ever happening here are quite slim to none indeed.  It is truly un-American, to say the least.  But both less extreme (in terms of criminal penalties) AND more extreme (in terms of lower BAC limits) versions of this have of course been applied to Americans under the arbitrary age of 21 for decades now:  just think of zero tolerance laws and social host liability laws.  And internal possession laws, constructive possession laws, use and lose laws, keg registration, and other face-saving ancillary laws to prop up the failed experiment that is the 21 drinking age as well.

Oh, and even with this law in place for two decades, Japan STILL has stubbornly refused to lower the drinking age to 18.  Even after lowering the age of majority from 20 to 18 effective in 2022, they still kept the drinking age and smoking age at 20, because reasons.  And that whole thing about easily getting beer and sake in vending machines (!) for the past few decades or so?  Well, now the vending machines will need to see (and scan) some ID, at least most of them, apparently, according to Reddit.

That said, Japan is actually surprisingly lax in general by American standards about things like public drunkenness (as long as one is not being disorderly, of course), drinking in public, drinking on public transportation, and even drinking in a car (!) as long as the driver isn't drinking.  And alcohol is available almost everywhere, from convenience stores to supermarkets to vending machines and even in fast-food restaurants as well. That's largely because no liquor licenses are required for serve alcohol on-premise in Japan, and even though such licenses are required to sell alcohol for off-premise, they aren't exactly hard to get.

Twenty-One Debunked strongly opposes drunk driving, of course, but still does NOT support such an extreme approach to it like they have in Japan.  Rather, we support a graduated BAC limit of 0.05% for administrative-only penalties, 0.08% for criminal penalties, 0.15% for "aggravated DUI" criminal penalties, and a limit of 0.00% if driving recklessly, and grudgingly support 0.00-0.02% zero tolerance for young and novice drivers, ideally based on number of years of licensed driving rather than age alone.  Riding a bicycle under the influence should be a traffic violation, not a crime.  (Walking under the influence should not be illegal at all in itself, of course.)  And we believe in individual responsibility, thus the only people punished should be the drinking drivers themselves, not the passengers or servers, as that would be un-American.  Thus, we also believe that dram shop and social host liability laws should be repealed, or at least greatly watered down, as far as consenting adults are concerned.

Crack down HARD on actual drunk drivers, with sobriety checkpoints (provided that they follow the Constitution, of course) and especially roving and saturation patrols as well.  "Rovin' Eyes....are watching YOU!!!"

(Contrary to what some believe, something approximating de facto "random breath testing" actually IS possible in the USA, they just have to be more creative about it.)

Repeat or high-BAC offenders, and especially those driving recklessly as well, should lose their licenses immediately and permanently, and go directly to jail.  Do NOT pass GO.  Do NOT collect $200.  Do the crime, do the time.  

Even first offenders (who have likely been doing it hundreds of times before getting caught the first time) should still be punished harshly enough to be a very serious deterrent as well.  We also need to expand the use of ignition interlocks for ALL DUI offenders, as well as things like DUI Courts and South Dakota's highly successful 24/7 Program.

Kill or maim someone else as a result of driving under the influence?  Throw away the key!  NO MERCY!

And yes, the "skipper" taxi and rideshare services are an excellent idea that should be implemented everywhere, as well as also extending the hours of public transportation where it currently exists.  There is no reason to make the perfect the enemy of the good, after all.  And that will also help the hospitality industry survive as well.

To Japan's credit, they have proven that it is indeed possible to completely separate drinking from driving.  We certainly have to give them kudos for that, no doubt.

But criminalizing and jailing experienced and responsible adult drivers (let alone those around them too!) for having ONE glass of wine or beer with dinner?  That is simply a bridge too far for any free society that has even the slightest hint of a car culture.  That's not public safety, that's lunacy!

(And as Japan has shown, it's NOT like even that will be enough to appease the ageists into lowering the drinking age, as there is really NO appeasing anyone like that.  Meanwhile, far less strict countries, even with car cultures, still have no qualms about letting 18 year olds drink, as long as the don't drive under the influence of course.)

And of course, we strongly believe that the drinking age should be lowered to 18, period, and yesterday is NOT soon enough.  Let America be America again.  If you're old enough to go to war, you're old enough to go to the bar.  'Nuff said.

After all, at the end of the day, we're NOT Japan.  We never were, and we never will be either.

Is Drunk Walking Really More Dangerous Than Drunk Driving?

Or, "Why People Absolutely Need to Stop Citing Superfreaknomics, Yesterday"

Talk about losing the plot!

Only someone who has repeatedly read Superfreakonomics would really believe that.  (People are apparently still irresponsibly citing it to this day.)  In that rather tepid and disappointing sequel to Freakonomics by Levitt and Dubner, the authors claimed that, at least on a per-mile basis, a drunk person is a whopping eight times more likely (!) to be killed while walking than driving the same distance.  However, there are a number of flaws to that claim.  First, they assume that the proportion of total miles traveled while drunk is the same for walking as it is for driving.  This is dubious because drunk driving is far less common nowadays, and many who would have driven drunk a generation ago now choose to walk instead.  Secondly, it is more realistic to compare the risk per hour of traveling time rather than per mile, since far more miles are traveled by car rather than on foot.  Thirdly, the real-world relative risk for an alcohol-related pedestrian fatality does not rise to statistically significant levels until a BAC of about 0.15, while for driving deaths it begins to rise significantly at 0.05 or even lower, which is a very large difference.  To quote NHTSA in their Alcohol and Highway Safety 2001 report:

One interesting finding...was that the relative risk of involvement in a fatal pedestrian crash did not begin to rise until the pedestrians reached a BAC of .15 to .20. This is consistent with the hypothesis that safe walking is generally easier than safe driving, since the relative risk curve for fatal motor vehicle crashes starts to rise at a much lower BAC.

Finally, there is a significant qualitative difference between the two in that while a drunk pedestrian is unlikely to endanger innocent people, a drunk driver is very likely to do so.  That's precisely why the latter is illegal while the former is generally not, though some states do have laws against public drunkenness (which are typically only enforced if the drunk pedestrian is noticeably causing a nuisance or hazard to others).  We may never be able to determine exactly how risky drunk walking is to the drunk individual, and we certainly know that the risk is not zero.  In fact, the NHTSA report suggests that it can be quite significant at very high doses of alcohol.  There is also a risk of falls when one is "falling-down drunk," which can lead to serious or even fatal injuries.  But all things considered, drunk walking is still a better option than drunk driving at any BAC level. (Not that we are encouraging either!)

In other words, if you choose to harm or endanger yourself, that's your own business in a free society.  But the moment you significantly harm or endanger non-consenting others, such as driving under the influence on a public street or highway, it then becomes everyone's business.  Why is that still so hard for so many people to understand?

Never mind, we already know why.  Because too many people are apparently far too left-brain dominant to see the forest for the trees!  And the very same people who, upon reading or hearing about that questionable passage from Superfreakonomics, will inevitably see such specious reasoning as far more of a green light to drive drunk than as a red light to walk drunk.  Now I don't believe in censorship, but come on now:  if I was the editor of Superfreakonomics, I could see myself "accidentally" deleting that particular part of the book before it got published!

And finally, research has found that the best ways to reduce the number of drunk pedestrian casualties at the population level are basically the same strategies that would benefit all pedestrians (and cyclists) drunk or sober, most notably reducing speed limits and vehicle sizes, and otherwise improving infrastructure to be more pedestrian-friendly and bike-friendly in general.  We also need to crack down on and stiffen the penalties for hit-and-run crashes and distracted driving as well.  Anything else, in our view, is an Orwellian slippery slope just waiting to happen.

(Mic drop)