SIR,-1 would like to applaud Barbara Wootton's excellent article 'Crime
on the Roads.'
She asks, 'What can be done to stop the slaughter?' and concludes from the point of view of the magis- trate that with drunken drivers 'both the fact and degree of culpability may turn on niceties which it is almost impossible to evaluate.'
This makes the present vaguely worded law impos- sible to enforce and driving after drinking is probably the cause of about 500 road deaths each year; the • driver himself is frequently not the person killed in the accident.
If the law were altered so that it became an offence to drive with a blood alcohol concentration of more than, say 1.0 milligrams of alcohol per millilitre of blood this could be enforced unequivocally. Legisla- tion roughly corresponding to this is enforced in the Scandinavian countries and the US. • Adequate enforcement would deter driving after drinking and many lives would be saved.—Yours faithfully,
BARBARA PRESTON
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