Lower BAC limits?

[balthazarr]

http://www.theage.com.au/national/ca...0811-egz6.html

Call to revise .05 limit
Julia Medew
August 12, 2009
AUSTRALIA'S .05 blood-alcohol limit should be re-examined in light of overseas experience showing a .02 limit reduces road fatalities, Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Stephen Fontana has said.

Speaking at a binge-drinking forum in Melbourne yesterday, Mr Fontana said alcohol was linked to a third of car accidents in Victoria, and that, personally, he was not opposed to lowering the limit to .02 to bring Australia into line with countries like Sweden.

''We are still getting a lot of drivers who are well over the limit, so we might need to rethink that (.05 limit),'' he said. ''We still have a lot of problems with alcohol on our roads.''

Most Western countries have blood-alcohol content limits (BACs) between .05 and .08, but a handful of countries, including Sweden and Norway, have introduced a .02 limit, with stiff penalties for any breaches.

The Commonwealth Government's National Drug Strategy says that although there is little international experience of alcohol levels below .05, research shows that when Sweden changed its limit from .05 to .02 in 1990, alcohol-related road fatalities dropped 8-10 per cent.

The strategy said it was therefore assumed that if Australia reduced its limit to .02, it could expect a similar reduction in its road toll.

Last year, Victoria Police breath tested 1.4 million drivers and found about 5700 over the limit.

In the same year, 50 drivers - 28 per cent of drivers killed on Victorian roads - recorded levels of .05 or more.

Of these, most were heavily intoxicated, registering more than three times the legal limit.

Dr Michael Lenne, senior research fellow at Monash University's Accident Research Centre, said lowering the limit could save lives.

But he said it was difficult to know how much of a deterrent a .02 limit would be to those who already drank excessively and drove.

''We would need to do a fair bit of work on the potential benefits of it, given that most of the drivers who are killed have BACs well over .05,'' he said.

He also cautioned against presuming Sweden's limit would have the same effect here, because it has much higher taxes and restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol more broadly.

I can't see how this will improve the road toll at all. The fools that drive way over the current .05 limit are not going to notice... all this will do is catch out the thousands (millions?) of people that have a drink or two after work on a Friday night.