America’s High Drunk-Driving Limit

Drunk driving is illegal almost everywhere. But what counts as drunk? Nations answer that question differently. Most say you can’t get behind the wheel when the concentration of alcohol in your blood (commonly known as B.A.C.) is 0.05 percent or more.

Only a quarter of countries enforce a limit above that. The United States is one of them: Its limit is set at 0.08. Experts say that’s one reason for the 13,500 drunk driving deaths here every year, according to the most recent data.

When I read about America’s outlier status in a recent report, my jaw dropped. As a reporter for The New York Times’s Well section, I sometimes write about how alcohol affects our health. Learning about our high blood-alcohol limit sent me down a rabbit hole to find out how it was established and whether people are trying to lower it. They are: “It’s one of our highest priorities,” Thomas Chapman, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, told me.

The Times published my article on the effort this morning. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain why the United States has such a high limit, why it matters and whether that might change.

Outlier nation

Everyone learns in drivers’ ed that drinking and driving is unsafe. Cognition, particularly sustained attention and multitasking, becomes impaired at or even below 0.05. On driving-simulator tests, people perform worse with any amount of alcohol in their system. Looking at how booze affects driving in the real world, one study reported that people with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 were 38 percent more likely to crash than sober drivers.