Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe NEW YORK, July 4 (UPI) -- This is the time of year when we get assaulted with "Don't get drunk" ads. Of course, they don't call them that. They're "Don't drink and drive" ads, or "Know when to say when" ads, or "Be a real friend -- take the car keys" ads. But I've noticed something over the past five years or so. Advertisement Gradually the messages are changing from "don't drive drunk" to "don't get drunk at all." They're not so much about protecting lives on the highways as about making alcohol into this Evil Thing that no right-thinking person should ever over-indulge in. Didn't we go down this road once before? Didn't Carrie Nation fight this battle a hundred years ago? Didn't we have ten years of total alcohol prohibition, thereby proving that it doesn't work? The difference a hundred years ago is that we had women saying, "We don't want you MEN to drink," and the men saying, "Well, we LIKE to drink, so we'll do it at the club where you can't catch us." Women hardly drank at all, and when they did it was some sort of fruity thing like a julep. (Come to think of it, not that much has changed.) The battle over drinking is partly the ancient battle of the sexes. Women could live without it. Men couldn't. Advertisement Earlier this month the Michigan legislature put into effect a new law saying that "I was too drunk" can't be used as a defense to any crime or behavior, no way, no time. I would be surprised if it's constitutional -- you're supposed to be allowed to put on any defense you want the jury to hear -- but let history record that the bill was sponsored by a female. And Michigan wasn't the first to do it. Ten other states have outlawed a defense that was previously honored for almost a thousand years: admitting intoxication as a way to plead that your judgment was impaired. The only way this can be interpreted is that drinking too much is, it itself, now a crime. "The defense that you don't have to take personal responsibility because you are drunk," said State Representative Ruth Johnson, sponsor of the legislation, "is against everything this country stands for." Well, not really. Laws like that weren't even common in Communist Russia, where they penalized you for the slightest outrages against public "normalcy," but where drunkenness was still regarded as a partial defense. When the Constitution was written, public drunkenness was a crime, but when other crimes were committed while drunk, it was considered a mitigation. That principle lasted about 200 years, and I don't think the courts enforcing it were un-American. Advertisement It's not a crime to get drunk. Let's start with that. We're going through some kind of retro-Puritanism phase right now in which any kind of benevolent depiction of intoxication is banned. Foster Brooks, Red Skelton and Dean Martin, entertainers who traded on their intoxication, doing "drunk acts" onstage, would probably be picketed by the PTA today, and they certainly wouldn't be allowed on national television. The reason given, if you press for an explanation, is to cut down deaths on the highways. But what if, like me, you have no car? Why is it assumed that everyone is driving? Even if you DO have a car, you might not have it with you. And how is the bartender -- on the hook for "over-serving" laws -- supposed to know whether the person he's serving has a car or not? Haven't we passed laws that essentially say it's no longer legal to get drunk, even in a bar, regardless of whether you're driving or not? So the whole driving issue is a red herring. The real truth behind all this legislation is that the authors of it simply don't like liquor. If they could bring back Prohibition, they would. And making it illegal to do anything WHILE drunk is just a back-door way of saying you should sip one wine spritzer per day and then go home and have some coffee. It's yet one more example of government trying to legislate lifestyle. Advertisement It also assumes that everybody is drunk in the same way, at the same level, in every case. It makes no distinction between actual blackouts -- when you really DON'T know what you're doing -- and being one-tenth of a point over the legal level of drunkenness. It makes no distinction between the guy who is impaired after one drink, because he's an alcoholic, and the guy who can drink ten but still make judgments. There was a time when it was believed that judges and juries should make these kinds of fine distinctions, but now we have one of those "zero tolerance" laws. "Zero tolerance" is the solution for people too lazy or stupid to FIGURE IT OUT. "Zero tolerance" is for people who think every court case is the same, every defendant is the same, and every judge is a child who shouldn't be allowed to look the accused in the eye and make a judgment call. (Increasingly judges aren't allowed to judge anymore.) "Zero tolerance" is the language of the fanatic, the zealot and the witch-hunter. I'll give you an illustration. In any drunk-driving case, there are three factual points in time that have to be studied by the court: Advertisement 1. When the guy started drinking. 2. When the guy got into his car. 3. When the guy got stopped, either because of an accident or because he was pulled over. The number of drinks has to be divided by the time that elapsed between point 1 and point 2 in order to figure out how drunk he was. At point 2, there could -- under the old laws -- be two types of mitigation. He might know he's had too much to drink but get in the car anyway. He might think he's under the limit. Or he might be so blind drunk that he doesn't even know what city he's in or what day it is. Under the old system, evidence would be presented to determine what kind of decision he was making, if any at all. This is all moot now. The legislatures and courts have essentially said, "People who drink have no rights." A person having an actual alcoholic blackout -- a person who is, according to the American Psychiatric Association, clinically ill -- is regarded at point 2 as a person who is rationally choosing to endanger other people's lives. But the law goes even further. Current DWI laws say that, if you cause an accident while drunk, you're punished MORE than a person who drives recklessly for some other reason -- for example, a person who's just angry, or stressed-out, or sleepy. The logic here is that you ALWAYS know what you're doing when you get into the car, even if later events prove that you don't know what you're doing. You get an extra year, or ten years, tacked onto your sentence for choosing to get behind the wheel, even if you can prevent evidence showing that you didn't choose to get behind the wheel -- evidence that is now forbidden anyway. Advertisement What this does is hammer you for point 1 -- having the first drink. It's a law against drinking. And maybe that's what they want. God forbid anyone should suggest that every case is different, that types of intoxication are as variable as types of people, that levels of responsibility are as complex as human beings. God forbid we should go back to having real trials instead of kangaroo courts. God forbid the courts should ever show an iota of mercy to a sick man. That would be so 19th century. (Joe Bob Briggs cab be contacted at [email protected] or through his website at joebobbriggs.com. Snail mail: P.O. Box 2002, Dallas, TX 75221.)
