By Erica C. Barnett

Next year, for the third time in three sessions, state Sen. John Lovick (D-44, Mill Creek) will introduce legislation that would lower the maximum blood-alcohol concentration (BAC) for drunk driving to 0.05 percent, making  Washington the second state, after Utah, to adopt a limit lower than 0.08 percent.

“I think this is the year we’re going to get it done,” Lovick said.

As a state trooper for 31 years, Lovick said, “I arrested as many or more drunk drivers than probably anybody. I just saw the devastation it caused on our streets”—statewide last year, more than one person died in a drunk-driving collision, on average, every day— “and it’s all alcohol-related. … We’re just tolerating too much. I think we need to do better to keep our communities safe.”

Representatives from the restaurant, beer, and wine industries argue that lowering the limit—a BAC of 0.05 percent roughly represents between three and four drinks in two hours—will unfairly penalize them while doing little to address deaths from drunk driving, which they say come largely from people driving to and from home and from people who are significantly above the current limit.

“We wholeheartedly want to work toward getting the number of DUI deaths down to zero on our roadways,” said Daniel Olson, executive director of the Washington Brewers Guild, which represents craft breweries. But, he said, “This proposal is not backed up by data.”

Specifically, Olson argued that Utah has not seen a decline in DUI fatalities since lowering its own BAC limit in 2019.  “It’s our opinion that lowering the BAC to 0.05 for DUIs will not result in a reduction in DUI deaths on our roadways, based on Utah data,” Olson said.

Washington Traffic Safety Commission (WTSC) external relations director Mark McKechnie counters that drunk-driving crashes rose everywhere during the pandemic, but that Utah’s plateaued and then dipped last year, while other states have seen steady increases.

But even if you don’t find Utah’s data compelling, he said, there is plenty of evidence out there—from the 75 percent of countries in the world that have a drunk-driving limit of 0.05 or lower—showing that places with lower limits, from Japan to France to Australia, have lower drunk-driving fatalities, because the lower limits serve as a deterrent. It isn’t that people drink less; it’s that many of them no longer drink and drive.

Overall, McKechnie said, decreasing the maximum BAC from 0.1 percent to 0.08 percent results in a 9 percent reduction in drunk-driving deaths, and cutting it to 0.05 leads to another 11 percent reduction in lives lost because people got behind the wheel impaired.

“Most of the world has adopted this, it’s working, and it doesn’t produce the kind of unintended consequences that we hear about” in Washington state, McKechnie said.

The hospitality industry, particularly wineries, argue that Washington state is different because unlike Europe, we don’t have reliable public transit outside major cities.

“Something that … is frustrating for us [is to be told that] somebody can just get an Uber, or get a bus, or stop at a friend’s house or whatever,” Washington Wine Institute director Josh McDonald said during a WTSC-led webinar on the proposal this week.

“Those don’t exist out in in most of our wine regions. …We’re in a worldwide competition wines across the entire world. We need [customers] to come find us, experience us and and and believe in us as as their wine of choice.”

But McKechnie said there are plenty of countries that have lower drunk-driving limits than Washington’s and minimal access to transit. “I wanted to ask, have you been to Ireland? Outside of Dublin, most of Ireland is very rural and has very limited public transportation in most of the country,” McKechnie said. “It’s really easy to get a drink, and it’s really hard to get around, and yet they have a fraction of the [DUI] fatalities that we do.”

Lovick said he doesn’t “buy the ‘rural communities’ argument” because people can choose a designated driver or wait to drive until they’re no longer impaired. “We’re trying to hold the person’s who’s drinking accountable. There are so many ways of getting around—[we’re saying] you can drink all you want, but just don’t drive,” he said.

One thing the industry representatives and advocates for lowering the limit agree on is that if there aren’t enough people to enforce drunk-driving laws, they won’t have an impact at any level. “Having additional troopers, having additional police patrols, is something that would significantly lower traffic fatalities,” Washington Hospitality Association external relations director Julia Gorton said during another recent WTSC webinar on the proposal, held earlier this month.

As a former state trooper himself, Lovick said when he would pull someone over for impaired driving, he thought of the kids who lived and played in the street in front of his own home. “When I stopped someone driving and I gave them a physical sobriety test I would ask a simple question: Did I want this person driving in a cul-de-sac where my kids were playing, or a street where fifth-grade kids were out there serving as crossing guards? Ask anyone: Would you want someone out there is a .06, .07, .08 out there driving where your kids are playing?”

McKechnie believes it’s only a matter of time before Washington, and other states, follow Utah’s lead by lowering their drunk-driving limits. It’s a familiar story, he said: “We’re hearing the same arguments today that we heard about the change from 0.1 to .08 I think we’re here now, considering this, because that clearly did not fix the problem. We Don’t think 0.05 is going to be a panacea, but it’s going to be an important piece of the puzzle to significantly reduce fatalities of the type that’s most common.”