Driving While Drunk: A Brief How-Not-To Guide

This post is dedicated to my deceased friend and law school classmate Nancy Sara Yellin of blessed memory (1969-1997), whom a drunk driver killed with depraved indifference in South Florida, along with three of her family members in the same car.

There are a number of ways to prevent drunk driving; one can aim at the driving or at the drunkenness. Either way is entirely acceptable.

This week will be the 4th of July and it has been a hot, nasty mess in the mid-Atlantic in the midst of the recent storms. A lot of people will be getting exceptionally well-lit on the 4th to forget about the miserable experience of losing power, losing air conditioning and having everything be a sweat-drench, hideous mess. Regrettably, we will see many an avoidable tragedy and outrage in the next 48 hours, though that outrage, that tragedy, that grief that we don’t forget ever CAN be avoided.

The problem is that a lot of hot, sweaty, dehydrated drunks, rampant power outages, dead or malfunctioning traffic signals in the most densely populated parts of the state and strained emergency response services could make for a horrible, horrible 4th of July.

This Law Office handles alcohol motor vehicle charges as part of its routine practice but nothing would please me more than to see no DUI cases come to my desk from this Fourth of July. My children, family, friends and clients ride on these roads; Maryland is my home and I know no other. Please prevent tragedy in our beautiful, if currently sweaty and under-electrified, Free State. Please: sleep it off, catch a cab, get your sober friend to give you a lift. Watch a movie. Play drunk Pictionary or drunk Twister or drunk strip poker. If you must, fornicate. Just don’t drive.

If you want to get drunk, get your sleep-it-off place nailed down before you pour the first cold one. If you want to drive, keep it to bottled water or Diet Coke, or give yourself a massive amount of time after drinking to sober down all the way – ALL the way (think four+ hours or more). It will be very hot and dehydration is easier when you are drunk and hot and sweaty; your judgment of your sobriety may be severely impaired by the heat and dehydration. If you are a host, keep the drunks in your house and don’t let them leave and if they leave anyway, call 911 before they kill somebody. Lawyers and bail bondsmen are expensive but less so than funeral homes.

If you or your family member or friend or child should screw up (don’t screw up, but if you do) and need a lift to avoid driving drunk, call my office at 410-561-6061 (Baltimore) or 301-531-4355 (DC) or Tweet me at @BruceGodfrey; I will get the message. I will do everything I can to arrange a free lift home for you or drive you home myself to any destination within 60 miles of Baltimore or Washington if I cannot get it arranged otherwise. Just let me know.

I miss you, old friend.

Posted by Bruce Godfrey

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