Reminder to Graduates Please Don't Drink and Drive
In Reminder to Graduates Please Don't Drink and Drive subject, Car crashes remain the leading cause of death for teens.
Graduation is a time for celebration, but it can also cloud rational decision-making. Couple this with reckless, wild behavior, lack of driving experience, impaired motor skills, and distraction from a carload of friends, and you have a perfect storm for a terrible accident that will change your life forever or take it away.
Motor vehicle accidents are still the leading cause of death for teens, and a quarter involves an underage drunk driver. Statistics show that your chance of dying in an auto accident doubles if the driver is under the age of 21, and doubles again with each year younger.
Texting and Driving
Tech-savvy teens are particularly prone to texting and driving with social apps like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter.
In addition to alcohol, there are plenty of other distractions. Texting and talking on a cell phone are the new drinking and driving in the digital age of smartphones, just like DUIs.
The presence of passengers compounds the problem more. Fatal crash rates for 16 to 20-year-olds increases by a factor of five when two or more teen passengers are present, as opposed to when teens drive alone. This is one instance where safety is NOT in numbers.
The Good News
The drinking trends among young people have been on the decline over the past 2 decades, and DUI fatality statistics have correlated with this trend. It seems young people are drinking less, at least as a whole, according to the data:
College students are also drinking more responsibly, apparently. Much of this can by attributed to the hard work in spreading awareness by groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). MADD spends over $30 million dollars in spearheading campaigns to curb drunk driving.
However, don't let these declining trends fool you. Drunk driving is still an epidemic, along with it's new growing counterpart “Drugged Driving”. To put it into perspective, every 2 minutes a person is injured seriously in a drunk driving, or drugged driving accident.
Those are not very good odds, and we can certainly improve on that.
