Toothless Law Doesn’t Deter Drinking While Driving : Texans Still Having One <i> on </i> the Road

In the Lone Star State, it may now be illegal to drink a beer and drive, but the chances of being caught are mighty slim indeed.

Say, for instance, that a Texas driver is caught holding a Lone Star beer that is half empty when he is pulled over by a police officer. Grounds for a ticket? Not a chance.

Since Sept. 1, it has been against the law to drink and drive. But drivers may be cited only if the police officer actually sees the booze being downed. In effect, the cop must watch the Adam’s apple bob before he can write the ticket.

121 Tickets Issued

“It’s a difficult law to enforce,” said Mike Cox, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. He said that, in the first six weeks that the law has been in effect, the highway patrol has issued 121 tickets. In contrast, that agency writes roughly 65,000 speeding tickets a month.

But, as Cox and others point out, at least there is a law now, in a state where drinking a “road beer” has always been taken as a God-given right. Until it was passed by the Legislature last session, Texas had no law at all against drinking while driving. California banned such practices 26 years ago.

State Sen. Bill Sarpalius of Amarillo, one of the authors of the bill, said he settled on a watered-down version because he had been trying for years, without success, to push a tougher set of laws through the Legislature.

“I just didn’t have any luck,” he said. “You can only take a step at a time.”

‘Better Than Nothing’

Melanie Towb, the administrator of the Dallas chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, also takes the “half is better than nothing at all” view.

“It took several years of work by our people encouraging legislators to please consider a bill,” she said. “We are ecstatic that we’ve gotten this.”

The passage of the bill has led to some interesting ruses, including increased sales of plastic wrap-around labels that make beer cans look like soft drink cans. John Vecchio, a Dallas-area novelty distributor, said sales of the labels jumped after the law went into effect.

His own view is that the law is not “strong enough to have any effect on the drinking driver.”

Dan Turner, a spokesman for the Houston police department, said there were no records yet on the number of drinking citations issued in Texas’ largest city. But he doesn’t foresee drinking and driving leaving the Texas scene.

“A habit like that is kind of hard to break,” he said. “It’s just like smoking.”

Some May Be Deterred

But Cox, of the highway patrol, said there may be a segment of the population that will stop buying road beers for the drive home.

“We think there is a certain percentage of Texas motorists who, simply because it is illegal, won’t do it any more,” he said. “They are the same people who began putting on their seat belts when it became mandatory.”