Drive drunk twice in Quebec, get ignition breathalyzer for life
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
> The SAAQ says visually checking a driver's licence may not be enough, as a hard copy does not always provide up-to-date information. The agency reminds people that their car could be impounded for 30 days or more if the driver breaks the law.
> For a fee of $1.75, the SAAQ will verify a licence through its website.
> "That would be a wise thing to always do whenever you lend your car, even to your best friend," said Kramer.
> "That person might have kept it secret that they have an alcohol interlock in their own vehicle. Family members might not be aware of it. Friends might not be aware of it."
They want you to pay $1.75 for a single query against a database? That makes AWS prices look cheap.
I’m not sure about the laws in Canada, but aren’t these convictions public domain? Presumably someone could just scrape that and build a free API?
Maybe they could require you to add (and verify) a credit card and then not charge it for fewer than 30 queries a month.
Of course, it's a solution that brings other problems, but it's one way of using payment systems to provide the service and keep it free for everyone but the scrapers.
Letting a visibly drunk person get behind the wheel is obviously a big no no, but there are many shades of grey here. You should not be responsible for other people's failures.
The obvious solution is to never lend your car out to anybody, but that is not the optimal solution.
They want to set a price that's high enough to stop people invading the privacy of everyone they know for a cheap laugh, but low enough that it won't put people off checking if they're genuinely concerned but also very poor. Making it, say, $5 would cause some people to seriously think whether or not they can afford it.
I could be mistaken but I believe it was the SAAQ that had "business hours" for one of their online services where you could only submit a form between 9 and 4 or something ridiculous like that.
I fully understand why many people have zero sympathy for DUI offenders. I certainly expect none. But I'd like to shed some light on the fundamental cause: alcoholism. The average DUI offender has driven drunk over 80 times before their arrest.
When sober, I know as anyone else what a bad idea it is to get behind the wheel. The problem is, it is darned hard to avoid taking that first drink. Then the second. Alcohol is everywhere. And when you are drunk enough, you don't care how bad the criminal penalties might be.
Deterrence is not enough. And out of all the treatment programs, financial cost, etc, the only thing that was really helpful in curbing my alcohol use, strangely enough, was the interlock.
Addicts don't think ahead. But sober addicts can, albeit with difficulty. Sober addicts know that if they have an interlock, and if they take that first drink, they won't be able to drive, and they'll be stuck. So they might not take that first drink. My pattern of drinking was to stay late at work, drink there, then drive home. With the interlock, that meant sleeping in my office, not an attractive proposition. Sometimes I did take that first drink, and did sleep in my office. Or I took a Lyft. But at least I wasn't on the road.
So I think interlocks are good. The technical issues raised here about them are real, though. It bricked my car for weeks, once. Also, the one I had not only had you breathe to start the car, but randomly while driving, and there was a time limit. This could lead to very dangerous situations where I was trying to negotiate difficult traffic and blow in the damned thing simultaneously. Not good design for something intended to improve traffic safety.
The only truly effective way to deal with it in the short term is to make it impossible, or as hard as possible, for them to perform the behavior. This is why the interlock works.
If you want to understand why criminal penalties don't work well (although I'm not opposed to them), think of it this way. An addict is like a lab mouse, operating purely by stimulus and response. For every one time a person is caught for DUI, they get away with it 79 times. They learn that they can get away with it. In a sense, they are actually rewarded by getting away with it.
I have long thought that it would be incredibly helpful if DUI offenders were required to have a special decal on their licences, that would prevent anyone from selling them alcohol. Non-DUI alcoholics who wanted to get sober could also get one. This would be virtually cost-free to society and I believe it would save many lives and help many people get clean.
I fully understand your post. I wish I could say I never had the good sense to drive impaired, but it's not true. Thankfully, I've been sober a few decades now.
Your story reached me.. Thanks for posting.
While I have no sympathy for drunk drivers, this technological solution is sufficiently unreliable to be dubious.
While I support the idea itself, the technology is incredibly unreliable, and since it only affects "criminals", there's no public demand for them to improve.
or maybe they recognised he could go and get someone else to blow in it?
The most regular issue was nicotine spray setting it off.
It had to be serviced once in a year and this service was included in the price.
Personally I think a lifetime sentence is a bit harsh but I definitely agree that drunk drivers should have an ignition lock for a long time, perhaps 5-10 years.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_under_the_influence#Ri...
The article states that you're not allowed to operate a car without one installed.
Perhaps extrapolate your statement out to other forms of justice meted out by society and ask if you'd say the same about those crimes?
I'd certainly hope I could get a driving job today if worse came to worse. I did my time and certainly paid my dues. Technically it's been long enough that my crimes are wiped off the record and I can legally not mention them to workplaces/authorities.
It's very easy to demand heavy lifetime justice for everyone you don't sympathise with, a lot harder to make it fair and equitable to the longterm benefit of a society. I honestly don't understand how the US treats their convicted criminals, it's basically a life sentence in many respects.
Just can’t do it twice, I think that’s fair.
As in you can't ever drive again afterwards? I'm fairly honest here about my own failures in life, by this judgement do you think I should never be able to drive a car ever again? Most of my life has been living in places with absolutely no public transport, how exactly do I go to work as a middle aged person having being deemed unworthy of 60 years of no license because of being a young idiot once upon a time? Please go down this path and say what should happen
I am not trying to be snarky here, but absent living in rural environs, there are usually options for personal transport that do not require operating a motor vehicle. Again, it is a tradeoff society makes between personal liberties, i.e. the privilege to drive versus public safety. And different jurisdictions may have differing standards on where that line is drawn.
There was a case with a 14 year old girl here in Denmark who got hit and murdered by an ex teacher of hers who was super drunk and crashed into her in an intersection -- the impact was so bad it basically blew the bike a part.
And it is the most stupid crime possible to commit, since the upside is so small and the downside so huge.
Personally I would support an instant death penalty for drunk driving if I didn't think it would be abused, so yeah I am okay with somebody not being able to support themselves after murdering a 14 year old girl. I hope the starve themselves to death on the street.
[0] In Denmark manddrab (manslaughter) is the term used by the Danish penalty law to describe the act of intentionally killing another person. No distinction between manslaughter and murder exists. The penalty goes from a minimum of five years (six years in the case of regicide) to imprisonment for life. The standard punishment for manslaughter - i.e. where there are neither aggravating or mitigating circumstances - is 12 years imprisonment.
I, for one, find this to be a barely passable minimum punishment for two DUIs
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/trudeau-sparks-outrage-wit...
Might be (first source that popped up). Does it make it untrue?
The point is: One the one hand people are willing to forgive terrorists and reintegrate them into society, on the other hand you're forced to have a breathalyzer in your car for the rest of your life for drunk driving twice within ten years.
Should you do it? No. Knocking back a couple beers and driving isn't the equivalent of walking off a sheer rock face though.
The only thing that's caught up with Quebec is their puritanical tendencies, see: the CAQ being elected.
[1] https://www.alcohol.org/bac-calculator/
[2] https://www.verywellmind.com/drunk-driving-the-dangers-63002
[3] https://www.cars.com/articles/are-the-odds-ever-in-your-favo...
Edit: According to a comment below, for every 100 fatal accidents caused by drunk driving, additionally there are approximately 220 serious injuries and 1,800 minor injuries.
Your third link says accidents will be the cause of death for 1 in 77 people and compared it to 1 in 276 people dying of skin cancer. Does this mean I shouldn't bother wearing sunscreen?
That's statistical feel-good thinking
Young adults don't usually die of natural causes
Impaired driving, while it is certainly a concern, gets too much "think of the children/puritanical" influence.
How many people are impaired by lack of sleep? By texting? By lack of or confusing road signs? And while all of those are addressed more or less, none of them are tackled as punitively as DUI.
(And of course different BACs have very different effects, or even the same BAC can affect people differently)
I'm with you 100%, and again, I don't recommend anyone ever drive drunk. It's hardly the responsible thing to do. I was pointing out that it isn't as most people assume, that if you have 2 drinks you're going to die in a multi-car pile-up.
I also suspect those under-25s had more than 3-4 drinks, and also that they likely drove extra recklessly as under-25s tend to do — hence their insurance premiums and inability to rent cars.
We should always evaluate the proportionality of our responses especially as humans are notoriously bad at managing low risk of a strongly negative outcome.
> Your third link says accidents will be the cause of death for 1 in 77 people and compared it to 1 in 276 people dying of skin cancer. Does this mean I shouldn't bother wearing sunscreen?
Not wearing sunscreen may well help you avoid skin cancer and have other ancillary benefits to both you and reefs. [1] tldr: vitamin D supplements don't work and sunscreen blocks your ability to synthesize vitamin D and nitrogen oxides (which lower blood pressure).
re: cancer risk of sun exposure: the most common cancers due to sun exposure are basal-cell carcinomas and squamous-cell carcinomas, which are almost never fatal.
People who work outdoors are half a likely to develop melanoma, and similarly for tanned people. “The risk factor for melanoma appears to be intermittent sunshine and sunburn, especially when you’re young,” says Weller. “But there’s evidence that long-term sun exposure associates with less melanoma.”
but I digress, you don’t have a mandatory sunscreen application machine stapled to all the doors of your house by law if you fail to put it on twice haha
[1] https://www.outsideonline.com/2380751/sunscreen-sun-exposure...
Case in point, according to Schneier, many more people died because they chose to drive instead of fly after 9/11 (and the increased airport security theater) than died in the actual incident. [1]
You could make the same case, what if it was my family in the towers? My heart goes out of course to those people but the decision made as a result was not the right one for society.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2013/08/our_decreas...
It’s about the individual decision to drive drunk and the risk that this individual decision creates each time.
Given these numbers, you can keep cranking the knobs but is that really going to be an effective use of money?
At this point, it looks like the only people left are the really hard cases. And they probably need medical and mental health care more than jail.
Whenever I have contact with DUI stuff in the US, about 1/3 are young, idiotic dipshits who did something egregiously stupid and dangerous and wind up on the straight and narrow after being punished. The other 2/3 are so clearly repeat, hardcore alcoholics that desperately need some form of treatment and are so bad that I wonder how they can even function.
If they dont want help and keep repeating then the second is absolutely needed. The problem isnt that they are addicts and self destructive, but that they carelessly endanger other peoples lives. One would imagine what an apocalyptic outcry it would be if any other drug, that large parts of society consume daily, was found responsible for people starting to kill people in their surroundings. Do you all remember the PCP scare? Or the Spice Horror stories?
Is there anything to suggest that they don't want help or is it that they can't afford help?
Alcoholism is not easy to shake off for various physiological reasons (drying out an alcoholic seems to damage your impulse control brain centers, for example).
Consequently, treating alcoholism is rather expensive.
The scary part is how inaccurate and secretive breathalyzers can be. You have no right to cross examine the machine's software or anything. It's a magic blackbox that is treated as irrefutable truth.
Also, in the US, and I assume in Canada, standards for new cars have generally not affected peoples' rights to continue owning and driving existing cars. If new requirements are really onerous, it will increase the market for previously produced cars, and then we can debate whether to force people to upgrade or something.
So far, the world hasn't found one. A breathalyser is a pretty small price to pay if you already have two DUIs.
Note that anyone who has been caught driving drunk twice has, statistically speaking, probably been driving drunk a lot more times than those two.
Also you turn to psychologists for assistance with handling recidivist alcoholics.
Crippling insurance costs?
If you're caught here then you better have deep pockets, assuming you get your licence back in a year.
Drunk in this case is precisely defined in the law as a permillage of alcohol in the blood stream (the law varies per country, but you should know the ones applicable to you). Valid methods of measuring this are described as well.
Incidentally, what you say is almost literally what every inebriated driver who caused an accident resulting in severe harm or loss of life says afterwards before coming to terms with their actions.
And of course what the law defines is an alcohol limit, which is probably very conservative: it cannot define the meaning of the word "drunk".
I think every opinion and decision must be challenged, otherwise, when only one side of the debate has legitimacy, you end up with entirely skewed decisions. And since drunk driving does kill people, and nobody dared to defend drinkers, there has been a lack of balance in the initiatives against it.
So I'm sacrificing my karma for the sake of some balance :)
Said every drunk driver, ever. I have no respect for drunk drivers. You don't care about your life, that's on you. But you are putting the lives of other people in serious jeopardy by doing this. Someone could end up having their life destroyed, or maybe even dying because of your shitty actions.
> And since drunk driving does kill people, and nobody dared to defend drinkers, there has been a lack of balance in the initiatives against it.
There is a reason behind this. When you are drunk, you have lowered inhibitions, poor judgement, more (often unwarranted, like in your previous post) self confidence, vision problems, poor hand-eye coordination, drowsiness, the list goes on. You should not in any case be driving while drunk, and you do have to be daring to defend drunk driving. I am happy there has been a lack of balance in that regard.
If it was just you driving on am empty field or track where the only person you could harm is yourself, I'd have no problem with it. But you are putting others at risk, and that's where I draw the line.
People are influenced by others, younger drivers in particular. You are not only responsible for your own actions, but also for the message you send to others.
Actually, the whole justice system is based on a faulty idea that all humans rationally evaluate the risk of getting caught. Some people will follow the law regardless, some will decide what crime to commit by evaluating the risk, and some will break the law regardless of the risk. That last category needs a different system.
If I'm an insurance company, or other entity dealing with large numbers of "getting caught", then indeed, I can rationally determine that it will happen x% of the time and plan accordingly.
But if I'm an individual, and I don't have a way of significantly changing the risk, then all I can do is make a binary decision - do the risky thing, or don't. If the risk is small, then I'm probably going to do it. How is a person "rationally" supposed to react to, say, a risk going from 0.1% to 1%, when the choice is only do or do not do?
But for drink driving, you typically do it many times without getting caught, so you could respond to changed risk by changing how often you do it.
The whole supporting yourself thing should already be a deterrent from maneuvering a ton of metal at speed on public roads while impaired. Contrary to popular belief, driving is not a right, it's a privilege and I firmly believe that the state should take it away from you if you fuck it up. I don't want to get into the whole gun debate but gun ownership (about which I have mixed feelings) is a right, protected in the US by the constitution. However, there are mechanisms in which a single mistake (unrelated to gun ownership or operating a gun) will have the state take that right away from you. Statistically speaking, based on the number of deaths, a car is more dangerous than a gun. Why aren't we applying the same types of bans? Because Joe Bob can't help himself to downing a couple of beers before driving, I need to share the road with him because he 'must drive' in order to sustain himself? Fuck Joe Bob. He can bike, take the bus or ride a cab.
If driving is essential for a person to be able to sustain themselves then it should be regarded with a much higher attention in the first place, attention which should warn you that drinking and driving is monumentally selfish and dangerous, especially repeating it.
Not in rural parts of the country. Before driving existed the US had much better public transport. I think your argument holds water in Europe, but not the US, where driving is essential for most people to survive.
I think this should be an argument for building public transport though, since many people are excluded societally when they don't have a means of transport.
But in rural parts of Australia, in the early days of cars, people could have to walk a whole day on poor roads to get to the nearest town in the relatively densely populated state of Victoria. Public transport is not an option in the country.
Participation in public life without a car is important and a human right, but it needs to be focused on towns and cities, not rural areas. Cars are optimised to the needs of the country.
Being able to support yourself might include having to move. Indeed it does for most people at som point in their lives. Situations change. If you lose your license because you do stupid things, you might just need to move somewhere near a bus stop.
Not sure why it’s to “criminalize being poor”. It’s criminal to drink and drive.
I agree punishment shouldn’t be disproportionately affecting poor people but really I don’t feel sorry for people who choose to drink and drive.
I think the more liberal alcohol limits is unfortunate because they can make the crime seem like an accident (“I only drank a little”). A near zero limit is much easier to comply with - if I drink at all I don’t drive until the after on the following day.
As a final note: not living near public transport is a choice in the first place. Not voting for politicians who prioritize public transport is another.
It can see unfair. There's a truck driver in my country who killed two people with his truck on two separate occasions. Both his fault. But he'll still be allowed to drive again after maybe a 6-12 month suspension.
The way I try to feel comfortable with such seeming injustice is to see road accidents as random bad luck. So by using the road, you're playing Russian roulette. You never know what might kill you or whose fault it might be, including your own. Extreme punishment for the tiny subset of dangerous drivers who make certain mistakes and happen to be unlucky enough to get caught won't really make it much safer. People still risk their own lives driving dangerously, after all, so even the death penalty for drink driving won't stop people doing it.
Using a road shouldn't be Russian roulette.
If you'd please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Otherwise, yes, of course. Thanks for the reminder.
If it actually worked, it could be like an insurance against their own worst proclivities...
In general, impairment is a trait that does lead to bad decisions, like driving under the influence.
Now since laying off drinking culture and focusing on health in 2012, I find myself ostracized and slandered by my old drinking friends and colleagues (look up scapegoat), and really completely alone in the world. I have become homeless and am mercilessly bullied at each job because I lack social skills of non-drinkers and am not likable to drinkers.
Everything is pushing me back to alcoholism. I have a bottle of wine in my bag that I don’t drink... I’ve had like 5 drinks in 3 years. In 2013 I was accused of DUI with 3 drinks in my system in 3 hours, and that has caused innumerable problems in my life. It’s on my record as DUI even though it was charded as “careless driving,” as there was no breathalyzer etc. No sympathy, no doubt I’d had some drinks so whatever. After being accused of DUI the month before moving back to SF I relapsed into heavy drinking with an old buddy for about a year, and worse, due to existential despair over the implications if DUI. Then I found out tons of people have them. Life is funny.
I’m more sober and healthy than I’ve been since 21 before I first drank, but I spent Thanksgiving alone on the street in Palo Alto, with my regular bathrooms closed and denied access to others. Sadly most people would slide back into drinking in my situation; I dunno what I’d do without YouTube.
I know I drifted off. I see some harsh judgement here and it’s uncalled for. Personally I think people should be able to demonstrate that they’ve been habilitated and have their records wiped. Alcoholism is complex, and the last thing that will help is imposing upon a life meant for growth. Dis-ease, to make uneasy; disease, like alcoholism. Penalties only make things worse. Revoke the license and treat the soul of the person and let them earn it back, sure. Spending a little time homeless hasn’t hurt me (18 months), so nothing in a treatment program should hurt anyone. The DUI popping up on background checks certainly doesn’t make me eager to apply to jobs; it comes with very harsh judgement; “rightly so,” my old self would say. No, permanent punishment for symptoms are pretty much evil.
But it’s also clear that many have risen above such circumstances and even far worse. So we protect the people from those who put them in great danger (whether by impulsive violent outbursts or dangerous drunk driving).
So you get caught violating the first punishment... and they simply slap you with another punishment?
That's like suspending a kid for skipping school.
I would think jailtime should be in order in that situation.
If people stared getting banned for life from driving in a province/state, either behavior would change pretty fast or at least we'd be rid of repeat offenders.
Here in Denmark it now cost a point on your license, as well as about 200 or 300 dollars in a fine. Depending on when you got your license, 2 or 3 points within 3 years will earn you a new driving test (which, unlike in the US, is really though to pass).
Arguably you should forfeit your license on the first offense, but at least this is better than the old rule.
Summary of Quebec demerit points: Demerit points last for 2 years, and if you have more than 8 and are under 23, you lose your license. Five demerit points would also add approximately $170 to the cost of license renewal. Points also make insurance more expensive.
Volvo has a camera system tech that either makes the car start beeping like not wearing seatbelt and even pulls you over once the camera detects you playing with your phone.
This would also be something parents and insurance companies would love. Though I think insurance companies have this new docking system you get from them.. dock your phone & keep it there while in motion and get a discount.
Are you referring to the rare condition where brewers’ yeast colonizes peoples’ gut and ferments carbohydrates into alcohol in vivo?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/business/drunk-driving-br...
The breath test is, I think (I am not a lawyer) insurance that there was reasonable suspicion of the person being drunk, not final proof of anything.
An arrest isn't a conviction. Police don't hand down these judgments.
I think your unstated assumption is that the level of the condition that causes health problems and/or a diagnosis is the same level that would mess with breathalyzers. It could be much less.
I wonder if some day, it would be a good idea to just put these in all cars? Drunk driving is a common enough (and deadly enough) crime that it would probably make everyone safer. And driving, of course, is a privilege, not a right.
The ramifications would be awesome. Reduced accidents, reduced fatalities, maybe even reduced alcoholism.
Let's get this put in place in the states. Thanks, Canada!
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/english-government-s...
Using the government's actions to define the natural rights of the government's subjects against the government is a little backwards.
Still better than the coworker that flew to Canada on business and then while on the trip his name got added to the "NO FLY" list. That was a fiasco.
I remember reading about someone who was denied entry to Canada because they brought anti-depressants with them.
You have no rights traveling across borders, and it's not just US officials that are arbitrary and unreasonable.
The guy who had the issue never camped with us again, even on the US side. Not fun.