It turns out that driving dangerously isn't the problem: the problem is driving having taken drugs. I don't understand it: if you're not dangerous to others, why should the law be concerned with what you do?
The argument, presumably, is that you're more dangerous than you were. But if we're going to take that line, then we should also make it illegal to drive once you're 50, because your reaction times are also slower when you're older. I don't remember the precise comparisons, but a 70-year old's reactions are as bad as a 20-year old's who has drunk more than enough to be over the limit.
If we care about danger, we should be testing reaction times. If we want old people to be able to drive, we should set a low reaction time limit, and train drivers and adjust traffic controls and car settings appropriately. We should then allow young people to be freer with impairing substances, because they can take it.
If we care about driving dangerously, we should prosecute the people who create speed differences, since it is changes in speed that cause problems. People who drive slowly on high-speed roads are as much of a danger as people who are driving fast and watching ahead of them appropriately, with cars tuned to have brakes good enough for the speed they can reach.
If we care about people's attitudes, then we have no way to judge them except through observation, and since dangerous driving is already an offence, we don't need any additional law about it.
The data about drink and drugged-driving look impressive, but if 20% of road fatalities are attributable to them, there's still plenty of room for other factors to be important. If there were as big a social stigma on 'old-driving' as there is on drink-driving, I wonder how many accidents would have 'old-driving' listed as a contributing factor (since drink-driving is always a contributory factor when someone who's drunk anything is involved in an accident).
Both of today's news stories suffer from the same problem: there is an assumption that everyone is identical; that any already identified differences are irrelevant and that everyone in the story is starting from the same blank slate. For better or worse people are different: like snowflakes, we have near-endless variety but share some basic features. Many people have waxed lyrical about the beauty of human diversity, and yet it seems that the basic message has yet to penetrate the thick skulls of many of those same people.
Our differences are morally neutral (barring differences caused by decisions, which can be morally charged), but in physical effects it's obvious that they are not neutral, and that we are not all the same. Any system which confuses the two is a confused system that needs changing.
If we have identified a physical effect that we want to avoid in society, then because humans vary we cannot treat everyone the same. That's like telling everyone that we want no-one to run faster than 20 mph, so everyone needs to run at 60% of maximum. It's ridiculous. Some people will be closer to the windy side of the law than others, and that's just the way it is.
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