DUI’s Legal Limit Legislation

by Kelly Dagenhart, RID OR/AC President

There is legislation in progress at the Tennessee State Legislature to move the legal limit for alcohol content of blood from 0.10% to 0.08% before being charged with DUI. This is certainly in the correct direction and has already been accomplished in 19 states with a resulting significant approximately 15% decrease in DUI caused fatalities and a significant reduction in accidents.

The point I wish to make here is that we should be reducing the legal DUI blood alcohol limit to 0.02%, which has already been done in Sweden and is now being attempted in Britain.

The following table gives the relative fatality risk versus the blood alcohol content from data provided by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Blood Alcohol Content (%) Relative Fatality Risk
0.00 1.0 (0% increase)
0.02 to 0.041.4 (40% increase)
0.05 2.0 (100% increase)
0.062.5 (150% increase)
0.07 3.0 (200% increase)
0.08 9.0 (800% increase)
0.09 12 (1,100% increase)
0.10 to 0.1448 (4,700% increase)
0.15 to 0.30 380 (37,900% increase)

In other words, we want an improvement to 0.08, which, when compared to a sober driver, still increases the relative fatality risk by 800%! This data proves that there is no safe level of alcohol for a driver. At the first drink he should be arrested if he drives immediately and does not give the body time to process the alcohol he consumed (one hour needed per drink).

Please contact your legislators that we wish the legal limit moved to 0.08%, but we do not wish to stop there and want to continue down to 0.02%.