Baby boomers are increasingly more likely to risk drink-driving than millennials
By Tony Rao, The Conversation
March 14, 2019
“Baby boomers,” all now over the age of 50, have shown the fastest rise in rates of alcohol and drug misuse over the past 15 years – and this is playing out on Britain’s roads.
At first glance, the latest data on reported accidents and casualties on public roads in England and Wales is little more than a general update. There are the standard statistics on drink drive accidents and casualties using roadside breath testing. There is also data on blood alcohol levels for accidents involving deaths from drink driving. In 2017, there were just under 171,000 casualties from reported road traffic accidents. This was 6% lower than in 2016 – making it the lowest level on record.
But more revealing data comes from the British Crime Survey. The Survey looked at self-reported driving by people who think that they have been over the legal alcohol limit at least once in the last 12 months. Between 2010 and 2018, there was a reduction of nearly 50% in the proportion of people aged 16 to 19 who took this risk. For people aged 50, it fell by only 11%.
The same survey also provided data on the proportion of people reporting driving under the influence of drugs over the previous 12 months – which paints a very different picture. Although there was a reduction of 61% for 16- to 19 year-olds over the past ten years, the reduction for baby boomers was a staggering 98%.
A likely explanation for the comparatively larger reductions in people willing to take the risk of drug driving compared with drink driving may be a change in the law over the past four years. Until 2015, there were no defined limits for individual controlled drugs when bringing charges against someone suspected of drug driving. This changed in 2015 through the introduction of Section 5A of the Road Traffic Act. This set an upper limit for the level of specific controlled drugs in a driver’s blood.