Have the PC police use the same tobacco jihad tactics against anyone buying booze. That is, start a campaign to ridicule and belittle anyone seen drinking. Make them societies outcasts. Afterall, anyone who abides in alcohol is a potential danger to themselves and others. They aren’t making the proper personal choices.

Oh, what’s that, – it’s ok to tax those stupid smokers you say. Those cigarettes aren’t good for them and we need to nanny them into proper behavior.

/s

The deck is already stacked high on that account.

BUT…..there’s no doubt, we’ve used it to get career criminals out of the public.

Good and bad.

I think it really brings up attention to the issue that we’re a republic.

Some states have lax laws. My state? omigosh, don’t even think about a drink after work.

I surely learned my lesson after shelling out almost $5000.00 for costs, fines, ARD class and lawyer.

I would favor a “3-strikes = incarcerated rehab” proposal.

I would, however, also favor the option of the death penalty for any homicide resulting from DWI.

Still, liberalism has gotten us to throw the baby out with its bath water. So be it; perhaps we should do away with forcibly committing mental patients just to stave off the usurping Obamas of the world. Then let’s talk about how his crimes still merit retributive punish and that retribution should increase as he continues to not only scoff at the law against drunk driving but make a mockery of the judicial system that continues to grant him lenience if for no other reason than the law as yet is not written to allow for greater punishment.

I would also argue societal considerations are valid because that is why we have a federal republic. The founders recognized that each state would be a community in and of itself despite being part of a greater nation and that is why the vast majority of laws–particularly those regulating society, i.e. marriage–are delegated to the states.

There are hundreds of people that have lost their license for one reason or another. But yet, you hear about them getting pulled over for the 15th time still driving without it. It will never change until you make it not worth doing it and spending a few years in jail just might get the message through.

Oh, and I’m not talking about sit on your rear end, work out with weights all day jail. I’m talking tent city, chain gang, make big rocks into little rocks jail time…..

People will never get the message until they learn that the consequenses far out weigh the crime…

But what do we do with dangerous non-violent criminals when they refuse to rehabilitate?

Getting behind the wheel drunk as a skunk is, in my mind, a violent act in search of a victim. It’s no different than waving around a loaded gun; eventually it will go off and someone will get hurt, or die.

Throw away the key. Who cares about this guy who clearly cares little about himself and even less about others.

Diabetics do have a metabolic disorder and management of it is something that can be controlled within limits. These are inexact analogies as how one’s body processes blood sugar varies widely across the day and even day-to-day. Having been in an NIH study to examine the effect of a medication on Type I, I can say that individual reactions can even confound the medical research specialists. I’ve had the experience of waiting four hours for my blood glucose levels to rise and they didn’t… barely budged around a central value just within the human normal range. Each individual can understand their own responses, over time, but anamolous highs and lows, with no forewarning happen. Unlike alcohol there is a direct way to measure blood glucose, and that is via blood testing… and with each test on a glucometer costing 2-5 cents (for all materials and cost of index solution spread across its 90 days of shelf life when opened for use on each container), plus it being relatively invasive makes some diabetics hesitate to pull over when driving to test blood glucose levels: you now have to pull out of traffic to someplace relatively safe, test yourself, and then get back into traffic.

There are longer-term blood glucose testing systems, but they suffer in higher daily cost and have a lag time of fifteen to twenty minutes. So those are good for trend-line analysis, but very poor for what your current condition is… that said you can set warning indicators and meal indicators and other things on the device, as it is worn on the wrist. I am hoping that Moore’s Law will bring down the cost of these devices and their test surfaces (those things cost like you wouldn’t believe), plus get longer life per test surface. That isn’t there yet. Purely mechanical fixes don’t work when its a question of individual liberty – self-restraint and personal responsibility must be the key.

This in no way mitigates the driving hazard of having an insulin reaction or slipping into the early phases of extremely high blood glucose levels… but take a look at the percentage of diabetics in the general population and compare that to the accident rate due to such incidents, and remember these people are on-call for self-monitoring all day, every day, no time off ever. You can binge drink, but you can’t do that with a metabolic condition like diabetes and expect a half-way decent life before complications start to set in, and some will happen no matter how good your control is as there is just so much that can be done via manual or automatic injection methods. So the equation for that is far more difficult than ‘take X ozs alcohol and your BAC is at Y for Z time and decreases at a decay rate thereafter’. I really, really wish diabetes was that simple: it isn’t. Nor are other metabolic conditions that can have impairing effects with sudden onset (sudden being 5 mins or less). That is quite different than the imbibing of alcohol with a known body mass distribution, uptake and outcycle in someone with normal metabolic function.

Thus exercise is alcohol uptake is a personal liberty: do or do not according to your capability to fund it and suffer the consequences.

Exercise of personal responsibility for diabetics is not a liberty: it is mandatory, has important factors playing outside the control of the individual, it can be managed over time to give a sense of decent control of the situation but that can change suddenly with little warning and requires resources from your liberty to maintain control on a constant basis. When you treat it as a liberty and decide not to take care of yourself, you pay the consequences of that by just being alive and then we hear folks bemoaning the costs of retinopathy, neuropathy, and dialysis. Those are not cheap to society, either, but its main cost is to the individual, and no matter how good your control is, you cannot predict internal tolerances for these longer-term problems, just mitigate them by better control and see what your physical response is over time.

Both can have one incident problems: over exercise your liberty to drink and you get consequences, let slip your oversight of your diabetes for a short period of time and lose the ability to recognize that something is wrong.

One requires forethought.

The other constant vigilance.

We can punish for the activity and consequences, but the law also allows for mitigating factors beyond the ability of an individual to properly control at all times at all places. One is putting oneself in harms way, the other is coming to danger by relaxation of one’s cognizance of their physical state. They can both have bad outcomes one is fully under the control of the individual, the other is not. Which is why we have mitigating factors for punishment in the law.

Isn’t is interesting that some suffering from diabetes can drive down the wrong side of the road for miles, crash into other cars and even kill people. But they are not guilty of anything because it is a “chemical imbalance”. It is a “chemical imbalance” that occurs because they have failed to manage their disease by eating or taking their insulin.

Drunks, on the other hand, are routinely jailed and reviled because of a “chemical imbalance” (high blood alcohol content) that occurred because of their own actions.

I had some friends that were police officers that chased a car for over ten mile through rush hour traffic. It was weaving and driving on the wrong side of the road. When it ran off into the ditch and they ran up, driver started fighting with them. They slammed him and cuffed him up. Once they got him in the car they noticed the smell indicating a diabetic reaction. They called medics and they treated the driver for a diabetic reaction.

For this they were harassed and reviled by the local newspaper,local politicians and the public. They thought that the policemen were too rough with the driver.

Don’t pick on the poor cancer cell. He don’t mean it. It’s the body’s fault.

Meanwhile, Sharon Tate’s sister has to keep attending Charles Manson’s parole hearings.

Particularly since murder doesn’t even always get a life sentence.

Bad cases make bad law.

Now this instance you describe, why hasn’t the DA charged the driver with reckless endangerment, and put him in prison that way?

We don’t need more laws, just more common sense application of the ones that already exist.

Pelayo on April 1, 2009 at 9:14 PM

your idea screams “nanny state”

benny shakar on April 1, 2009 at 10:46 PM

Think of all of the misery your parents could have avoided if they had an ObamaBortion.

I’d give her name just to she could be publicly harassed, but that’s probably against HA policy.

Spiritk9 on April 1, 2009 at 6:26 PM

I hope you sued for any and all income that bi@tch ever earns. I also wish you would post her email address–she needs to hear from 100,000 of your closest friends.

Bless you and your son, in all of your trials.

I drove around Germany on vacation like a typical American driver. No turn signals, left lane cruiser, fog lights on with no fog, etc…..

This lasted about 2 days. Everyone was honking, pointing, flipping me their version of the bird, flashing headlights at me. I made mention of it casually somewhere, and got read the riot act.

They take their driving damn serious in Germany. A word of advice: DO NOT CRUISE in the left lane in Germany. You can be arrested for it. If you’re moving at less than, say, 120mph in the left lane, you’re in danger of being run over by a 4 ton Mercedes. Ask me, I know. No collision, but don’t ask me how……

If we cannot apply the death penalty to someone who has killed 3 or more people then even having this question is as irrelevant as it gets.