Justice : States Trying to Make ‘One for the Road’ a Forbidden Phrase : Drunk-driving laws getting tougher. Now, even passengers may be charged. Problem drinkers branded with a ‘Z.’

Hal Stratton never denied he was drunk. What he did dispute, though, was the contention that he had driven the truck home. “I weren’t driving,” he told policemen who showed up at his door. “Buzzy was.” The officers, responding to a complaint, had followed tire tracks of Stratton’s truck through the snow on the night of Jan. 24, 1990, from the Bob In bar in Waterville to his brother’s house, a mile away. Stratton, a logger, staggered to the door when they knocked. His friend, Buzzy Wyman, was passed out on the sofa inside.

Stratton, 21, told them he had given his keys to Wyman after leaving the bar because his friend was “soberer.” Wyman was never charged or given a breath test, but Stratton--the passenger--stood trial and was found guilty of being an accomplice to drunk driving. He was fined $300 and lost his license for 90 days.

Last May, the Maine Supreme Court upheld the verdict, ruling that a passenger who allows an intoxicated person to drive can be convicted as an accomplice. “What the court is saying,” said Stratton’s attorney, Ronald Bourget, “is that criminal liability may now extend to your choice of designated drivers. Don’t drink and drive has become don’t drink and ride.”

A Death Every 23 Minutes

The court’s decision--believed to be the first of its kind in the nation--sent a clear signal: From Maine to California, states are waging war on a crime that kills one person every 23 minutes and injures another every 90 seconds. And, as the penalties for driving under the influence become tougher, drunk drivers find themselves under siege. Increasingly, the refrain “one for the road” is tantamount to a summons to jail.

In Iowa, new license plates starting with the letter “Z” identify third-time offenders as problem drinkers, permitting police officers to stop and test the drivers at will. California has given the police authority to immediately revoke licenses of DUI suspects. Albuquerque, N.M., is threatening chronic drunk-driving offenders with prison sentences. Oregon is debating an automatic 90-day license suspension for drivers under age 21 who show any alcohol content in a breath test. Maine mandates 48 hours in jail for drivers with a blood-alcohol content higher than 0.15%.

“Thirty years ago, it was sort of OK to get drunk. People laughed at someone who was inebriated,” said Col. Andrew Demers, commander of the Maine State Police. “That attitude carried over to jurors. From their perspective, when they got a drunk-driving case, it was often, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ We had a tough time getting convictions. Now, society is against the drunk driver. Jurors are frowning. District attorneys aren’t so apt to plea-bargain or dismiss cases.”

Maine and California are among five states that have lowered the blood-alcohol level--at which drivers are considered legally drunk--to 0.08% from 0.10%. That equates to about four drinks in an hour for an average 160-pound person. Under old laws that had been in effect since the 1920s, the amount a person drank was inconsequential as long as he did not drive unlawfully. Today, the blood-alcohol content in itself is cause for arrest regardless of whether one’s driving is impaired.

“This is not a new problem,” said Robert H. Reeder, general counsel of Northwestern University’s Traffic Institute in Evanston, Ill. “From the very beginning, when cars first appeared at the turn of the century, municipalities recognized we had a problem with drinking and driving and started passing laws to deal with it.”

By 1909, Reeder said, New York had a statewide DUI law. Within 20 years, every state had followed suit. Testing drivers’ blood for alcohol dates to the 1920s, and in the 1930s Indiana introduced the first instrument to measure blood-alcohol content--the drunko-meter. Since 1953, when New York enacted landmark legislation, drivers are considered to have given their “implied consent” to being tested for alcohol by the mere act of operating a vehicle.

Although safety experts today estimate that one of every 50 drivers is drunk on any given night, tougher legislation and changing public attitudes are slowly clearing the roads of drunks.

Between 1980 and 1989, a decade when America’s driving mileage increased 30%, the number of drunk drivers killed in crashes annually declined 25%, to 9,820 from 13,110. In 1982, 57% of all fatal crashes involved a drinker or pedestrian who had been drinking. That fell to 50% in 1988 and 49% in 1989.

The impetus for the change came in 1980, when a 13-year-old California pedestrian, Cari Lightner, was killed in Fair Oaks by a repeat-offender drunk driver. Her outraged mother, Candy, formed Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would grow to 3 million members and become one of the more powerful grass-roots lobbying organizations in the United States.

MADD, with no agenda other than ridding the highways of drunk drivers, worked with state legislatures, monitored courtrooms where judges and district attorneys were known to be lenient in dealing with DUI offenses, developed educational programs and, with the help of the media, made highway carnage a national issue. In 1988 alone, more than 900 bills were introduced in state legislatures toughening the penalties against drunk drivers. In many cases, law enforcement authorities received new powers to hunt down intoxicated drivers, including random roadblocks, the legality of which was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court last year.

“We didn’t just blossom and change the world by ourselves,” said MADD’s president, Micky Sadoff of Milwaukee, who, with her husband, was seriously injured by a drunk driver in 1982. “But I do think that, when MADD was born, we provided the spark, partly because we gave a voice to the victims.”

New Behavior Standards

At the same time that MADD was convincing legislatures that punishment was a stronger deterrent to drunk driving than rehabilitation, a country that practically invented the notion of tolerance began challenging an individual’s right to behave as he chose.

Either by choice or law, Americans started fastening seat belts and wearing motorcycle helmets. States lowered the speed limit to 55 and raised the drinking age to 21. From coast to health-conscience coast, moderation replaced excess as a standard of acceptable social behavior; pasta and sparkling water were in, red meat and whiskey out.

The demand for distilled spirits has fallen in the United States every year since 1980. In 1988, the adult per-capita consumption of alcohol was 2.21 gallons; in 1989, 2.15. As sales fell, the climate in the country became litigious and, some sociologists said, vaguely reminiscent of the era that preceded Prohibition. Many people, a San Francisco bar-and-grill proprietor was quoted as saying, “feel a moral imperative to stop other people from drinking.”

“We used to get groups who’d come into the lounge after dinner and stay for a few rounds,” said Portland restaurateur Tony Di Millo. “Today, that doesn’t happen. They just don’t come.” Di Millo’s floating restaurant, the largest in the nation, does $5 million a year in business; its annual bill for insurance liability against alcohol-related incidents is $300,000.

MADD and those trying to crack down on drunk drivers have faced virtually no opposition. Dan Warren, a former Maine legislator, remembers making a brief speech on the floor in 1988 against the state’s proposed ban on open containers of beer or spirits in cars.

Fight That Can’t Be Won

“I said the pendulum had swung too far,” he said. “I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t be able to crack a beer driving home after work. The target should be drunk driving, not drinking itself. Seventeen brave souls voted with me. The number against was, I think, 140.”

Although drunk driving is now viewed by most as a criminal act, even the optimists say the fight can never be fully won.

Traffic accidents remain the greatest single cause of death for every age group between 5 and 32. They have killed 460,127 people since 1969--equivalent to the population of Wyoming--and alcohol has been involved in about half of those deaths, according to the Transportation Department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Last year, traffic fatalities totaled 44,529, down from a 1972 peak of 54,589.

The traffic safety administration’s director, retired Army Gen. Jerry R. Curry, disburses about $55 million annually in federal grants to state programs against drunk driving. He doubts that the United States will ever go as far as Sweden, which imprisons first-time drunk drivers for up to six months and lowered the blood-alcohol level to 0.02%, thus making the drinker of a single beer subject to arrest. But he thinks the direction of public attitudes is clear.

“I believe you’ll see the 0.08 (blood-alcohol level) as the standard across the country in the next 20 years, and zero tolerance for drivers under 21,” he said. “Laws will get more and more stringent, and that’s how it should be. People are finally realizing that drunk driving is a violent crime that claims more lives every year than murder.”