As the good doctor says.
Being inebriated slows your response time, decreases your coordination, and impairs your decision-making processes. While one might become practiced in understanding how alcohol impairs you, it’s very hard to believe that “practice” will prevent or lessen the actual impairment. However, it’s easy to believe that someone has convinced themselves that they can effectively compensate for the impairment, in order to rationalize driving drunk.
Habituation/tolerance can lessen the degree of impairment, but there is still impairment.
Plus, of course, the glaring fact that when drunk, the quality of your judgement goes way down.
I remember a PSA years back with several, handwritten I can drive when I drink and a note of how many shots were downed. The last one at eight was a barely legible scrawl. The caption at the bottom:
Drive a car when you drink?
You can’t even drive a pencil.
I remember c1990 when I tried to take the keys off of someone so inebriated he couldn’t insert them into the door, his wife (somewhat less inebriated) yelled at me that driving a car is entirely different from inserting a key into a tiny slot in the dark.
‘Twas the days before those MADD zealots took away all the fun of driving on Super Bowl Sunday.
As a dumb drunk partier in my youth (this would have been 70s/early 80s), me and the guys I drank with had a rule that “as long as you can keep it in between the lines, you were fine to drive.” While it’s hard to overstate how stupid that is, none of us ever got in any serious accidents. We mostly were driving backroads sub-35mph home from bars and the like. What you usually learn if you have any brains at all, is even in “that” level of drunk, you’re impaired in ways you don’t feel. Like you may not have any issues maintaining speed and keeping your vehicle in between the lines, but your reaction time is much reduced. I quit fucking around with it in the early 80s when I was in my mid-20s because I swerved to avoid a tree limb and in my inebriated state plowed through some woods–I was super lucky, the path my car took rolled through underbrush but no trees, I ended up in a farmer’s field on the other side of the wooded area with only mud all over my car as a real consequence. If I had been even a little to the left or right I’d have slammed head first into trees going at a decent speed (35ish), which maybe isn’t enough to kill you but a sudden impact at that speed can do a lot of damage.
We generally tried to stop friends who were blackout drunk/staggering from getting behind a wheel, even back then.
I drink a lot. I enjoy it. But damn, I don’t do things that would imperil my ability to pour myself a drink, that’d be nuts.
Why doesn’t he just porch drink, couch drink, park within walking distance drink, etc?
I’m assuming he is drunk every waking hour because he’s basically an end stage alcoholic. At some point most people have to drive in America, and if you’re drunk all day every day, you’re going to drive drunk.
Now it may be smarter to Uber, walk, use whatever public transit is available, but someone is likely drunk all day every day probably isn’t the best decision maker.