A Sample of Informative Messages Provided by the BAE CD-ROM

• When you get a driver's license, you automatically give your "implied consent" to take a breath test or other test to measure your blood alcohol.
• It is illegal to drive with a BAC at or over a certain limit. As of July 2004 all 50 states and the District of Columbia have enacted a BAC limit of .08 as the legal limit for drunk driving for drivers over the age of 21.
• In 2003, 17,013 people died in alcohol-related traffic crashes, a decrease of three percent from 17,524 in 2002.
• Of these fatalities, about 1,200 (or 7%) of all alcohol-related traffic crashes involved a drinking driver who had at least one previous DWI conviction.
• It is estimated drivers with a BAC in excess of .15 are only 1% of all drivers on weekend nights, yet they are responsible for nearly half of all crashes at that time.
• Drivers with a BAC of .15 or more — less than 1% of motorists in the U.S. on weekend nights — are responsible for more than half of the alcohol-related traffic fatalities during that time.
• For drivers with a BAC of .15 or above, the estimated risk of a fatal, single-vehicle crash is 385 times greater than for non-drinking drivers.
• Eating before you drink can lower your peak BAC. When running the CD-ROM program, click "food" to see the difference it can make.
• "Thinking" skills, like perceiving and evaluating risks, or processing information are not easily visible to observers, but they are the first skills to be affected by alcohol.
• Estimates indicate that 35-40 percent of fatally injured drinking drivers had a prior DUI conviction.
• All 50 states and Washington, D.C. have "zero tolerance" laws for drivers under 21.