Two stories this month should shake up the way that we think about drunken driving and how to prevent it.
Last week, the U.S. Transportation Department released statistics that show a nearly 30 percent rise over the last two decades in the number of arrests of women for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. During the same period, the number of arrests of men for the same offenses dropped 7.5 percent.
The second story was the tragic death of eight people in Westchester County, N.Y., where Dianne Schuler, a mother with alcohol and marijuana in her system, drove the wrong way for two miles before colliding with another vehicle, killing herself, her 2-year-old daughter, three young nieces and three men. Friends and family members were shocked to hear that her blood contained twice the legal limit of alcohol.
The two stories hammer home the point that men and women are both in danger of abusing drugs and alcohol, but for a variety of reasons can respond to it in different ways. And while public information and law enforcement efforts have had some success in discouraging men from getting behind the wheel when they should not, they are not working as well with women.
In the wake of the Taconic Parkway crash, substance abuse experts interviewed in The New York Times said that not all alcoholics are the same.
Women, it was reported, are much more likely to be secret drinkers, adept at hiding their abuse from family, friends and coworkers. There is a more damning social stigma for women who abuse alcohol, so they are more likely to pick times when no one else is around to drink, and take steps to control their appearance.
Others become adept at hiding liquor and sneaking it into social settings in innocuous packaging. Addicts are notoriously successful at deceiving the people around them into believing that they don't have a problem.
If no one knows that a woman is drinking, efforts to enlist others to stop her from driving, like the "Friends don't let friends drive drunk" campaign, won't work.
In an op-ed column in this newspaper Aug. 15, Polly Haight Frawley of Crossroads for Women, a substance abuse treatment program in Portland, said that the subterfuge is effective.
She cited studies that show that children of addicted fathers learn about his problem at about age 12. They don't learn about a mother's addiction until they are 18. And despite changes in the way families divide responsibilities over the last several decades, women are still much more likely to care for children, meaning that they are also more likely to be driving them around. That puts those children in danger.
There is a good reason that men are the focus of most law enforcement efforts to curb drunken driving. Males are still more than three times as likely to be caught drunk behind the wheel and still pose a significant public safety threat.
But the strategies that work for men may not work for women, who could be drinking in secret during the day instead of in a bar and so might be less likely to be caught by a late-night roadblock.
Clearly this is a problem that needs more study and a deeper understanding so that more lives, like the eight who died in New York, are not needlessly wasted.
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