Washington state’s patrol chief, John Batiste, made an impassioned plea to his state’s lawmakers a few days ago: Follow Utah’s lead.
It’s been almost seven years since the Beehive State reduced its legal blood alcohol level for drivers to 0.05%, down from the nation’s standard of 0.08.
It was supposed to start a stampede of 49 other states, like when Utah was the first to adopt 0.08 many years ago.
“I’m hired to save lives and to make sure troopers out there are helping to do that. And that is another tool, a law, that will help them do so,” Batiste said on a show called “Inside Olympia.”
Washington is one of several states that have toyed with following Utah to an alcohol tolerance level on highways that is more in line with the rest of the industrialized world. So far, however, not one has succeeded in passing such a law.
Dire warnings and scare tactics
Maybe that’s because of pressures from the beverage industry. It took a certain amount of courage for Utah lawmakers to make the move. If you weren’t in Utah seven years ago, or you have forgotten, the American Beverage Institute and others sponsored ads in Colorado, Idaho and Nevada warning people not to come here because they would surely get a DUI.
One ad went after older Utah lawmakers, under the premise that advanced age leads people to drive as poorly as someone with only .05% alcohol in their blood.
But the campaign ultimately failed. Utah’s state parks welcomed a record 13 million visitors last year. Inflation, layoffs, unpaid air traffic controllers and other threats to the nation’s economic health are far bigger concerns for local tourism than the legal blood-alcohol limit.
Fewer people drink
Meanwhile, the world is changing. For one thing, fewer people are drinking.
In 1945, 67% of respondents told Gallup they occasionally used alcohol. That reached 71% in 1976 and fell back to 60% in pandemic-plagued 2021. The most recent survey, in August, measured it at 54%, an all-time low. For young adults, the figure was only 50%.
For the first time, a majority of Americans, 53%, said they believe even moderate drinking is bad for their health. Among young people 18-34, that figure surged to 66%. Gallup said this may be due to recent research that has concluded no amount of alcohol is safe.
All of which is good news, even if it’s irrelevant to DUI laws.
Changing the culture
The point of a lower limit was never to reduce drinking. It wasn’t about throwing social drinkers in jail. It was about changing the culture so that people who drank didn’t drive.
It’s hard to know whether this has happened. The most recent report from the Utah Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice said there were 11,440 DUI-related arrests in fiscal year 2024, which was 2% more than in 2023. But that’s only one way to look at it.
The state’s DUI-related arrest rate is 33.5 per 10,000 in population, and that has declined steadily for 15 years, dating back to long before the .05 decision. It’s down 43% since 2009, despite a 24% increase in the state’s population. Alcohol-related fatalities are down as well.
The people who do drive drunk in Utah tend to be really drunk. The report said 42% of the drivers who were tested had levels exceeding 0.15. Only 10% measured between 0.05 and 0.07, the new low end of the range.
Before you complain that this shows casual drinkers are indeed being arrested, consider that they had to exhibit some sort of behavior that made an officer suspicious enough to do a test, even though some were undoubtedly stopped at DUI checkpoints.
The report also said that, of those picked up on DUI-related charges in 2024, it was the first such arrest for 75% of them, while only 8% had two or more prior arrests.
But has the culture changed?
Anyone who takes a drink and decides to drive has to perform an impossible mental equation in his or her head, taking into account body weight, a drink’s potency, the amount of food in his or her stomach, and the amount of time that has elapsed between consumption and driving, all to calculate whether the blood is at 0.05.
It’s easier just to decide that any drink is too much, and to prepare for alternative forms of transportation.
It may be impossible to measure whether this is leading to a cultural shift. It would help, however, if Washington and other states made the message a bit louder by climbing aboard Utah’s lonely bandwagon.