Statewide Drunk Driving Strategies Produce Outcomes

On the same New Mexican desert grounds where today's space-age missiles are tested, 10,000-year-old arrowheads have been found and the city of Hatch is known as the "Green Chile capital of the world." Unfortunately, New Mexico has long ranked among the states with the highest per capita number of alcohol-related crashes, with Native Americans and Hispanics having higher-than-average rates. But this is changing due to a host of policy and environmental approaches.

The New Mexico Department of Transportation, counties and coalitions throughout the state have spent the past decade implementing innovative changes at the local and state level that ensure a state like New Mexico with such a distinctive past will have a better future.

Using National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) funds and the CSAP Strategic Prevention Framework State Incentive grant money, New Mexico has developed a number of initiatives, policies, and laws that have saved money and more importantly, lives.

NHTSA data found that for one of every 240 miles driven in New Mexico in 1999, a person with a blood alcohol concentration of above the legal limit, .08, sat behind the wheel. Along with BAC levels that coincide with the other states, a minimum legal drinking age of 21, graduated licensing, Enforcing Serving Intoxicated Patrons Law, server trainings, and a number of other policies, New Mexico’s rates of people arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, have decreased significantly, said Glenn Wieringa, Underage Drinking Prevention Coordinator, New Mexico Department of Transportation, Traffic Safety Bureau.

“Our rate of alcohol-related crashes and DWIs is going down and that has been the result of a lot of policy implementation, especially using a combined law enforcement and media approach. Our DWI Czar Rachel O’Connor has done a masterful job of dealing with this situation. She put together a DWI leadership team that meets monthly. That involves over a dozen key agencies,” Wieringa said. “We invest a lot of our NHTSA money in media and sobriety checkpoints and research shows that those two approaches together are a best practice.”

Through the statewide Intensive Sobriety Checkpoint Program as well as through two to three media campaigns a year around seasonably high drinking points, the New Mexico Traffic Safety Bureau saw an amazing return of investment.

“The goal is not to arrest a bunch of people. The goal is to create a perception of risk of getting caught so people don’t drink and drive,” Wieringa noted.

If prevention and deterrence alone wouldn’t work, the state also passed a law for repeat offenders: mandatory ignition interlocks. The law, passed in 2005, made New Mexico the first in the nation to make this technology mandatory for people convicted of a DWI.

According to a recent NHTSA report, New Mexico has been on a steady decline for the number of DWI fatalities since 2004. New Mexico has moved from being 7th in the nation in 2004, to 17th in 2007 and dropped again in 2008 to 26th for DWI fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. New Mexico recently showed improvement in another national analysis of DWI fatalities – falling out of the top-10 for the number of DWI fatalities per 100,000 population. NHTSA data showed that in 2008, New Mexico ranked 11th in that category.

In response to the problem, CADCA and NHTSA also developed a course to educate prevention specialists on underage drinking/impaired driving, which was pilot tested in New Mexico earlier this year. The course focused on community approaches to address underage drinking and impaired driving.

Out of all the strategies used so far by coalitions, however, Wieringa thinks New Mexico’s three most potentially impactful policy and prevention initiatives worked on by some of the state’s DWI planning council in each county include: a social host initiative to educate the community about social host ordinances in each municipality; a pilot course, Alcohol Literacy Challenge for middle and high school students targeting sixth and ninth graders that combines media literacy such as alcohol ad analysis with alcohol expectancies; and the “Life of an Athlete,” an interactive online curriculum that teaches student athletes, their parents and coaches how alcohol impairs athletic performance.

The latter program is a particular passion for Wieringa, who hopes the voluntary program might be mandatory for student sport participation, along with a physician’s physical. Wieringa commented that “partnering with the New Mexico Activities Association was a great way to access coaches, their students, and their parents. We could not have done this without them.”

According to a University of Southern California report prepared by both experts in the psychology and preventive medicine fields, the competitive nature of athletes encourages them to drink larger quantities. In their report, published in the journal “Addictive Behaviors,” researchers Nadra E. Lisha and Steve Sussman studied the relationship of high school and college sports participation with alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. They found that while athletes report only slightly higher drinking rates than non-athletes, they are much more likely to engage in binge drinking and consistently consume larger quantities than non-athletes.

Wieringa concurred with the findings for his state: “In New Mexico, athletics are huge and such a large number of kids participate. If you can get them to change their alcohol consumption, it could potentially change the social norm in each and every high school throughout the state.”