Since the cars appeared, driving under the alcohol influence is a serious health hazard for both drivers and for the other traffic participants. As a consequence, George Smith, a London taxi driver, was the first person to be convicted of drunk driving, on 10 September 1897, when he was fined 20 shillings. Some recent statistics has reported that about 30% of all Canadian traffic fatalities and 44% of traffic fatalities in the United States have the alcohol at origin.

More and more countries are adopting severe financial sentences for those convicted of injuring or killing someone while under the influence of alcohol or drugs, in addition to being given a lengthy prison sentence. They also enforce strict guidelines on sentencing, for example, if a defendant is sentenced to ten years, he or she will be in prison for that entire time. In the past, prison time was reduced or suspended after sentencing had been issued.

The specific criminal offense is called, depending on the jurisdiction, driving under intense influence (DUII), driving while intoxicated (DWI), operating while intoxicated (OWI), operating a motor vehicle while intoxicated (OMVI), driving under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (DUI), etc. Many of these laws apply also now to boating, piloting aircraft, riding a horse or conducting a horse-drawn vehicle, or cycling.

I think you all saw in classic movies how guilt was established by observed driving symptoms, such as a walking a straight line heel-to-toe or standing on one leg for 30 seconds, completed with the arresting officer’s subjective opinion of impairment. Starting with the introduction in Norway in 1936 of the world’s first per se law which made it an offense to drive with more than a specified amount of alcohol in the body, objective chemical tests have gradually supplemented the earlier purely judgmental ones. Limits for chemical tests are specific for blood alcohol concentration or concentration of alcohol in breath.

With the advent of a scientific test for blood alcohol content (BAC), enforcement regimes moved to pinning culpability for the offense to strict liability based on driving while having more than a prescribed amount of blood alcohol, although this does not preclude the simultaneous existence of the older subjective tests. BAC is most conveniently measured as a simple percent of alcohol in the blood by weight. It does not depend on any units of measurement. In Europe it is usually expressed as milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood.

Driving under alcohol influence does not mean that one is alcoholic. We strongly recommend to everyone reading this article to stay out of alcohol abuse, however, if you or someone close to you have problems with alcohol addiction, we suggest you to visit Canada Drug rehabilitation