Drinking and Driving (Cause and Effect) - Essay Example

Nonetheless, the adverse effects of alcohol, when it is already time to take a drive to some other place or back to home, cause people to be susceptible to vehicle – related accidents which lead to injuries and deaths. Alcohol is a major cause in vehicle – related collisions that lead to injuries and deaths among people (Hingson and Winter 63). The numbers of recorded alcohol – related traffic deaths have declined since the early 1980s. However, even if this is the case, in United States, alcohol is still a significant factor which contributes to vehicle – related fatalities.

In fact in 2002, alcohol had significantly contributed about four (4) out of ten (10) fatalities due to vehicular accidents. Among all the alcohol – related clashes, about 42 resulted to injury while about 4 percent caused death. Whereas the case of non – alcohol – related vehicular clashes, about 31 percent resulted to injury while only 0.6 percent led to death (Hingson and Winter 64). . Since the younger population are much more engaged in drinking alcohol than the older segment, the young people are more likely to get injured or die in vehicular accidents.

This is supported by Maskalyk in the account of “Driving and Drinking” (313) and Hingson and Winter in “Epidemiology and Consequences of Drinking and Driving” (63 - 78) which are both written in 2003. Apart from that, Hingson and Winter claimed that more males are probably involved in alcohol – related vehicular accidents than females (64). This is for the reason that males are more involved in alcohol drinking as well as they are much heavier drinkers than females. Alcohol does not only put the lives of those who are driving while drunk at risk for it has also seriously endangered and destroyed the lives of other people than these drunk drivers.

In fact, there are many people other than the drunk drivers who get injured or killed. Hingson and Winter stated in 2002, that about 44 percent of the deaths in vehicular crashes had involved some drunk drivers. In these numbers of fatalities, about 22 percent were the drunk drivers’ passengers; about 13 percent comprised the pedestrians; about 7 percent were the drivers of the other vehicles which had been hit by the drunk drivers; and about 2 % happened to be bicyclists (64). On the one hand, Blum has written an article entitled “Drunk Driving: How it Hurts” which talks about a teen activist named Jackie Myers struggle against drunk driving (14 – 16).

Myers has lost five of her family members on a vehicular collision with a nineteen year old drunk driver. At first, Myers had considered that driving while drunk is just normal until she suffered from the effect