It's Time to Talk About the .08 Drunk Driving Limit in the U.S.

There are certain conversations that we in the alcohol writing (beer and spirits, for me) industry are always understandably reluctant to have. The most universal is of course direct acknowledgement of the various negative health effects of choosing to drink all forms of alcohol. The aversion to that conversation is a pretty common societal phenomenon in general–the majority of people drink at least some alcohol (despite the rise of sober culture and N/A alternatives), and have for centuries of human history. And yet, modern research tells us in increasingly unequivocal terms that even mild or moderate drinking can still have some negative health effects, even when handled in the most responsible manner possible. This flies in the face of decades of more optimistically tinged medical research, often cited over the years by drinkers to suggest that maybe there are some mild benefits to “moderate” drinking that could counterbalance the bad stuff. Alas, it has become increasingly clear that the majority of long-term effects of alcohol are the bad ones, and it isn’t really a matter of debate. This naturally causes some cognitive dissonance–we want to preserve drinking culture, but we also want wellness. Are we going to let that stop us from continuing to write features and reviews of new spirits and cocktails at Paste? Certainly not, because the passion for those subjects remains. But at the same time, it serves no purpose to avoid acknowledging the downsides and difficult conversations. And drunk driving really needs to be one of those conversations as well, especially when it comes to the .08 blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit.

It’s no surprise that Americans prefer not to think much about drunk driving and alcohol-related automotive fatalities. It would not be surprising, likewise, for the average person to assume that our national BAC limit, .08, is a number that reflects health research and national consensus. After all, if you asked someone on the street how a BAC limit for a nation should be determined, they would probably reply that said nation would consult its medical professionals and take note of what other countries are doing, and how effectively those restrictions seem to be working. So it stands to reason that the U.S. probably did that when it set the level of .08, right? Well, as it turns out: Not so much.

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The truth is this: The federal limit of .08 BAC in the United States is actually one of the highest levels for such a limit in the entire world. The majority of countries enforce significantly lower limits of .05 or less, and there’s ample indication that the U.S. reducing its own BAC limit to these levels would save a significant number of lives every year. The question therefore becomes: How much do we value these lives, and how strong is the argument that state governments should take action?

A BAC limit, for the purposes of what we refer to collectively as intoxication or “drunk driving” offenses, is determined on the state level. And as recently as the 1990s, there was still a good deal of state-to-state variation on official BAC limits, with some states having limits as high as .1 BAC. The idea of a national limit didn’t become codified until 2000, and even it wasn’t set in stone for the states–Congress simply passed a bill stating that states couldn’t receive federal highway funds unless they set their own state BAC limits to .08 or lower. This effectively created a cap, but the number “.08” was more of a compromise than anything, rather than a level based on scientific studies or world precedent. Indeed, the .08 level still puts the U.S. in the top 25% overall of national BAC/drunk driving limits. In a survey of 109 countries from 2019, only 29 of them had BAC limits above .05. Roughly 71 nations on the survey had a limit of less than .05, with 17 of them in fact having limits of less than .03 BAC. That’s less than half of the .08 legal in the U.S.

So the obvious question is, do these lower levels make a difference? And objectively, they do–any amount of alcohol in the human bloodstream has been shown to decrease overall driving performance, but at lower levels of concentration the reduction in performance is less pronounced. That is to say, a BAC level of .05 doesn’t magically become “safe” when .08 is “dangerous,” but the level of danger perhaps unsurprisingly is directly correlated with how much booze is in your blood. The National Transportation Safety Board put out a report in the mid-2010s on exactly this subject, coming to the estimated conclusion that reducing the national BAC limit from .08 to .05 would reduce fatal alcohol-related crashes by 11.1%.

Data suggests that lower BAC limits are effective in convincing a significant number of drinkers to be more responsible about driving.

So, how many lives is that? Well, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration states that for 2022, the most recent year on record, there were 13,524 drunk driving fatalities. That implies that reducing the national BAC limit to .05 could safe an estimated 1,500 American lives per year. In the abstract, perhaps that doesn’t sound like too many, but that is more than 7 fully loaded Boeing 757s of people whose lives could theoretically be saved on a yearly basis.

And in reality, the reduction in fatalities could potentially be even greater, and we have direct evidence from a U.S. field test that this could be the case. In 2018, the state of Utah became the first in the United States to pass a bill lowering its BAC limit for drunk driving to .05. The results have been pretty undeniable–in the following year, fatal crashes dropped by a total of 19.8%. Note, that isn’t even “fatal drunk driving crashes” specifically, but all fatal automobile crashes in the state, in the course of a single year. At the same time, seemingly none of the anticipated potential downsides of lowering the BAC limit presented themselves. The rate of intoxicated driving arrests didn’t climb, and actually declined from the rate a few years before the new BAC policy was implemented. Restaurant, alcohol sales and tourism revenue seemed to be unaffected. In short, it’s not as if people in Utah suddenly stopped drinking, or even drank measurably less in general once the BAC limit was changed–they just became less likely to climb behind the wheel of a car after drinking, stating that they were more likely to arrange a ride or other transport. In other words, awareness of the change in the law led to a significant number of Utah residents adopting more responsible behavior regarding alcohol. And even as someone who writes about alcohol for a living, it’s difficult not to be in support of that.

If there’s so much good data showing the potential effectiveness of these policy changes, then, what is standing in the way of putting a lower BAC into effect in more states, or on a national level? The biggest hurdle is likely to be the influence of big business in the alcohol and hospitality sectors, particularly those making significant campaign contributions to legislators on state and federal levels. In an industry notoriously resistant to change in laws regarding drinking and alcohol consumption, and at a time when many sectors of the U.S. alcohol industry are already struggling with a changing consumer base that is increasingly likely to experiment with reducing alcohol consumption, there’s an easily understood economic imperative at play here. It’s easy to see why any large alcohol manufacturer/distributor/vendor would fear that a reduction of the national BAC limit to .05 would cut into their bottom line. But although some of the largest alcohol manufacturing entities might well stand in the way of these moves, it’s worth noting that not all of them have signaled that they inherently oppose them. In fact, in a 2021 report from AB InBev, the world’s largest beer company, the company specifically says it will not oppose lowering state limits to .05, saying the following:

AB InBev has stated that it will not oppose efforts to reduce the legal drinking Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) limit to .05% anywhere in the world. As noted in the AB InBev 2019 annual report, “We believe that when you drive you should not drink, so we fully support all targeted legislation and enforcement measures to reduce impaired driving, including strict Blood Alcohol Content (BAC) limits and enforcement.”

Large entities representing the restaurant and bar sectors of the hospitality industry, on the other hand, may not be so easy to move, even with data suggesting that overall consumption/tourism rates haven’t previously been affected in markets where the BAC limit has been lowered. As ever, these battles may well play out between lobbyists in the halls of Congress and state legislatures, as advocates from public health agencies clash against representatives of the hospitality industry, each arguing on their own behalf.

At the end of the day, the hard data indicates that there are potentially thousands of American lives out there, waiting to be saved on a yearly basis, if state governments make basic moves that have been demonstrated to foster more responsible behavior in drinkers. It’s not hard to argue that we have a responsibility to advocate for a .05 BAC limit, if only to bring us in line with most of the rest of the world, and save some lives in the process. The numbers may be impersonal, but imagine it’s your own loved one who is spared, and you may find that the argument becomes a bit more persuasive. We love alcohol at Paste in all its many forms–I spent a decade as a homebrewer and love nothing more than a potent tiki cocktail–but we also have a responsibility to not endanger each other’s lives. It’s about time we start taking the idea of lowering the .08 BAC limit more seriously.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident beer and liquor geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more drink writing.

It’s Time to Talk About the .08 Drunk Driving Limit in the U.S.