Nonsense. We all know that since you are claiming to have only one beer and not drive, that you really have four or five beers and some jello shots, and then go out and drive on the public streets in order to wreak havoc amongst the school buses full of kindergarteners who are eagerly anticipating petting Bossy the Cow at the Alberta Provincial Fair.
You’re not fooling anyone, you know.
Too late to edit, but to add to my earlier post:
We can only control our own behaviors. Uzi, your refusal to get in the car even after one sip of alcohol does nothing to prevent anyone else from getting in the car after 1 drink or 10 drinks. So your little pyramid logic falls apart like a house of cards unless you’re proposing that everyone be forced not to get in the car after even 1 drink. The only way to impose that force is to make a law against it. So are you proposing making it illegal to drive with any measurable amount of alcohol in the system?
Isn’t this obvious??? This is what I interpreted as his/her meaning from the very beginning.
I’d propose that it should be illegal for anyone with any amount of alcohol in their system to drive a car.
And that ‘little pyramid’ is used by almost (if not all) every safety department on the planet. So, take your head out of your ass. By your logic it makes no sense to stop the guy from dropping his hammer from a scaffold. No one was hurt this time, right? What it does is attempt to stop a pattern of behavior. If the pattern continues then eventually someone will cause a collision even if it isn’t the OP. Why should you secure ‘your’ hammer because you are careful. Only the other guy has accidents. It may well be true, but the numbers don’t bear it out.
Another example is that when I go into my workshop the first thing I do is find my safety glasses (which should be in the one place I leave them). Why? Because eventually I will get something in my eye doing woodworking, sharpening a chisel, or just sweeping. The glasses limit those chances. By automatically doing it each and every time I ensure that it never happens that I’m without them the one time that little piece of metal wants to find my eye. My pattern of behaviour has changed. I also set an example for others and start to change their pattern of behaviour, too. That affects the numbers and decreases the chances of a major incident.
Actually, you are wrong here. Ethyl Alcohol can be absorbed through the mucosal layer of the colon. Personally, I wouldn’t call that drinking. Cite: More than you might wanna know about alcohol enemas.
So, Uzi, the next time you are out at a restaurant check out the people going into the restrooms and imagine what they are likely up to!
Without clicking on the link (man, I just got up, I don’t want to take a chance - shudder!), there was an episode on a 1000 ways to die where a guy had his girlfriend dump a bottle of whiskey up his ass:eek:. The host said he died because his liver didn’t have a chance to breakdown the alcohol before it hit his system.
Why stop at alcohol? Haven’t there been accidents caused by drivers being distracted by listening to the radio? Or by talking to passengers? Let’s remove all possible causes of accidents. Maybe we should require daily inspections of all vehicles to ensure that they are in perfect working order; after all, it’s possible that, for example, the brakes may be on the verge of failing.
You are equating talking to someone at the same level as taking a drink. The basis for human interaction rather than what beverage you’re choosing to have at lunch.
If you can prove that the risk is as high, then by all means I’d be for it. I’ve yet to hear of MACR (mothers against car radios), though.
And that you are comparing the basis of human interaction (verbal communication) to what beverage you choose at lunch should tell you the value of your analogy.
But one beer for a healthy average sized male with a meal who’s drinking it over the course of time and not gulping it isn’t a huge risk. It probably is on the level of verbal interaction if anything.
Are all your friends alcoholics? Do you know anyone who is capable of just stopping after one drink? Because there are people like that out there. Yes, there are alcoholics who can’t stop and who just keep going if there’s any booze out there, but most people aren’t like that. Many people go to restaurants every day, have a drink with dinner, and drive home without killing a bus full of nuns holding puppies. Do you know anyone who can drink responsibly?
Are you in favor of making it illegal to drive under the influence of other substances (e.g. prescription medicines, caffeine, nicotine) as well? What about tired drivers – should it be illegal to drive if you haven’t had 8 hours of sleep in the last 24 hours? And also to ban any distractions while driving, including any calls (hands-free or no), eating, drinking, listening to the radio, children in the car (they can yell and scream at inopportune times) and conversations with passengers? All of these could cause accidents or injury because they might possibly distract or impair the driver in some way.
It’s not up to the government to protect us from every thing that might, potentially, in one case out of many many cases, cause harm by banning everything. When there is a reasonable risk, yes. As everyone in this thread seems to realize, drinking one beer with food is not a reasonable risk for being a drunk driver.
How dare you equate human interaction with the consumption of…shudder alcohol? Especially the rearing of the next generation. If you can compare the basis of raising the future generation with alcohol, that should tell you of the futility of your analogy.
Or, um, something.
ex-fucking-zactly. I assure you, uzi, my head is nowhere near my ass. I work in criminal law. Trust me when I tell you making something as common as driving with any measurable amount of alcohol in one’s system illegal does nothing to prevent it from happening. All it does is toss away any sort of caution someone may have employed in trying to determine their ability to drive because hey, they’ve already broken the law, right? No need to exercise any sort of additional caution. Damage is already done, so fuck it. I’m talking reality here, not a bunch of studies failing to take basic human nature and logic into account when seeking to enact draconian laws.
If your entire argument is based on your alarmist “no one can have just ONE drink!!!” mentality, there’ s no reason to not ban smoking, cell phone use (hands free device or no) driving with other people in the car, ect. Your slippery slope works both ways.
No cite, but I would be extremely surprised if a study of distracted drivers (talking/texting on cell phone, fiddling with radio, carrying on conversation with passenger) compared to non-distracted drivers who’ve consumed one drink showed the latter to be more impaired. In fact, I would bet my house that the “sober” drivers would perform worse.
It used to be only in the late hours when I’d have to dodge drivers weaving in and out of their lanes; now, thanks to great advances in the “basis of human interaction,” it’s day and night, 24x7. Give me a highway full of drivers with a beer or two under their belt who are actually focusing on what they’re doing, please— you can share the road with your teetotaling chatterboxes and we’ll see who gets hit first.
We need a gub’mnt study that compares various BACs with respect to the net number of people left alive after subtracting the number of people killed by drunk drivers from the number of births resulting from drunken conceptions, for as we all know, if you don’t have one drink . . . .
I hereby propose that we all just stop talking to Uzi, and maybe he’ll go the fuck away. Forever. Because clearly he’s too fucking stupid to understand why his position is logically retarded.
Works for me. It’s liquid lunchtime anyway.
It’s Friday afternoon poll time.
Of the people who consumed alcohol at lunch today and then drove themselves back to work:
A. How many had no more and no less than one drink?
B. How many had more than one drink, and if so, how much alcohol and what do you estimate your BAC was while driving?
C. How many intended to have only one drink but ended up having more than one drink?
D. How many were driven to drink by Uzi’s inanity?
Do the forties I slam during my morning and afternoon commutes count?
orry, no. Only drinking while eating lunch counts.
In that case, I was going to have a martini with my lunch, but in honor of Uzi I guzzled a pint of lukewarm gin instead. That’s still just one drink, though, isn’t it?