Arizona
Students at The University of Arizona have a reputation as being a party school. This is great fun, but when it comes to safety, it’s a nightmare. A nationwide study found that 1 out of 5 college students admit to drinking and driving. Consider that these are the students who admitted to drinking and driving.
At party schools, you can almost guarantee sloppy drivers on the road Friday and Saturday night. Unfortunately, this is an ongoing issue for the campus. According to The Phoenix DUI Blog, “139 people were arrested for underage drinking at UA during a two month time frame last year. That number nearly doubled this year when 277 people were arrested for underage drinking during that same time frame.”
In the course of a year the number of DUIs’ more than doubled. Overall the state’s rate of DUI fatalities has gone down. But it’s pockets of the state that make up the bulk of the drunk drivers. Of course, we see the most irresponsible driving around college campuses.
Recently a 21-year-old Cheyenne Wheeler was caught driving the wrong way on Arizona’s Loop 101. She crashed into a guard rail then fled the scene. The woman had a BAC of 0.15 percent, way over the legal limit. Because of her sever impairment, she was driving the wrong way down a busy highway. This could have caused massive carnage on the highway. It’s a miracle nobody was hurt.
However, the blog does point out that the police force got additional funding to help get more drunk drivers off the road:
The dramatic increase in underage drinking arrests is not necessarily due to a greater number of college students consuming alcohol under the age of 21. UA police officers told KVOA that the reason the arrest statistics have doubled is because the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety gave the university a grant to have additional police officers looking for underage drinkers on campus. http://bit.ly/2vvoPcm
This overall is a very good thing. On its face, it looks bad for the city that so many students are getting in trouble for DUIs’. But at the same time at least they are being taken off the road. No matter how bad the statistics may look, what is most important is making sure nobody is getting killed on the road.
Support your local police. If you know of someone who repeatedly drives drunk and refuses to take a cab or Uber, it is your responsibility to say something about it. You seem like a bad friend, but you could be saving that person’s life, or the lives of a family. Remember, friends don’t let friends drive drunk.
