kisses,
B

I now have a postit note stuck to my monitor that says Don’t fuck with Bronwyn.

Indeed one should always include statistical analysis in their “challenges” (which is the word you used), but of course a challeneg is very different from a “successful challenge” aka “the law.” Rational basis is the lowest level of scrutiny, and is often viewed by courts as “just state a single reason and you win.” Statistical likelihood will almost always be viewed by courts as meaningless because inherent to a rational basis test is that the individual liberty is not particularly important. So the government will be justified in preventing in a single significatn harm. For example, state governments that outlaw organized dog-fighting will always be able to sustain the law against rational basis challenges even where one could argue that a state has not had a documented case of dog-fighting in 50 years. The government will easily win just by saying they have a legitimate interest in protecting dogs from this harm. Moreover, courts will often laugh at statistical analysis because it may just be evidence that the law is working if it has been on the books.

Statistical analysis may work in cases of higher scrutiny, where the liberty interest is greater, but a basic logical connection will almost always work in rational basis (such as “bikes can be dangerous, don’t ride them while drunk. The end.”)

If you think that this guy’s argument based on statistical analysis has a snowball’s chance in hell, then you should refrain from questioning other people’s legal prowess.

But that has absolutely shit-zero to do with the eeevil drug companies and absolutely everything to do with physicians’ (unintentional) ignorance about problems of drug-drug interactions and the information that can be gleaned from pharmacogenetics.

In other words, those of you harping on “drug companies are worse! WAAAAH” can stfd and stfu until they know what they’re talking about.

Back on topic, in 1986, my 14 year-old cousin was killed by an underage drunk driver. Not a blessed thing happened to that driver because he was underage and the laws hadn’t caught up yet to the problem. I will never understand why something like “aggravated vehicular homicide” couldn’t have applied (IANAL). Now, of course, the laws have gone far far FAR beyond the ridiculous.

It still seems to me that ye olde laws of yesteryear would have been perfectly sufficient, had they been applied properly.

Talk about jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

The potential harm caused by driving a motor vehicle impaired is the same potential harm caused by riding a bicycle impaired, regardless of the frequency at which such harm may result from each activity.

Given that according to physics, potential harm is a product of the mass and the square of the velocity (f=1/2 mv2) the potential harm is only equivalent if (1) the bicycle had the mass of a car and (2) the velocity of the bicycle is the same as a car.

I, for one, would be much happier had a drunk bicyclist — or ten — struck my late sister, rather than a drunk automobile driver.

Everybody has to start somewhere.

What’s the saying? “A Conservative is a Liberal who has been mugged. A Libertarian is a Conservative who has been mugged by the government.” ?

Not only that, but even after their transformation, they usually can’t see past the one issue, so they rarely apply their indignation to other encroachments on liberty that haven’t affected them (yet).

I don’t care much for single-issue libertarians.

The 13,000 deaths attributed to alcohol, are done so acfcording to alcohol-related, which throws anyone in the net who has had anything to drink at all (<.01) and doesn’t necessarily mean they were driving. And the deaths that are alcohol-related does not mean alcohol caused. In fact the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency also includes drunk pedestrians/bicyclists who wander out into the street and get killed as alcohol-related which further inflates the number. Plus approximlatey 55% of all a-r deaths are single car crashes which kill only the driver. So when you gt down to the real numbers and not the b.s. that is spewed by MADD, there are really onlyabout 1500 deaths that can really be attributed to a true drunk driver.

Further increasing the number the NHTSA also guesses that there are more a-r deaths than there really are. They run an algorithm on the results and find deaths which occur late at night, males 21-35 (if I remember correctly) and if any hits come up, they assume that these people were really drinking and the police didn’t check the box correctly and add that in.

So I would take all of the crappy drinking statistics as what they are, not worth the paper they are printed on. It’s just a way of snowingthe sheeple in this country into giving up their rights to protect them from the phantom menance which is a DUI. And thus a joke that the police have become.

A bigger issue in my mind is the extent to which the checkpoints actually serve their stated purpose. If revenue officers set up some “DUI checkpoint” which, over the course of a week, net fifty citations for driving without insurance, thirty citations for expired registration, etc. along with one actual DUI arrest, is it really a “DUI checkpoint”?

As a legal argument, the statistical likelhood of an event happening is completely meaningless in terms of whether the government has a rational basis to outlaw it. Protecting one person from dying from a certain activity (even if no one has ever died from it) is always going to be a rational basis. But from a political standpoint, it does make a lot of sense to ask why all the check-points and task-forces and penalties when this is just not a very big problem.

Arresting people for beng drunk while driving a bike reveals that the government cares more baout raising money than saving lives, as people should be encouraged to use bikes if they’ve been drinking.

REX, do you have a citable source for this number?

#16 Rex
21,000 people die each year from prescription drugs–a number that has more than doubled since Big Pharma was allowed to start advertising on television. That number dwarfs the deaths by drunk driving–when are we going to bring the guilty parties to justice for this trend?

By guilty party you mean the First Amendment?