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Maybe "ladies night," at the bar isn't such a good idea. According to a recent article by the Associated Press the number of women arrested for drunken driving has jumped nearly 30 percent in the past decade. The Transportation Department reported that the number of women arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs increased 28.8 percent between 1998 and 2007. On the flip side, the number of men arrested under the influence fell 7.5 percent during the same period.
"If you're over the limit, you're under arrest. This is a matter of life and death," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told reporters when asked about the increase in DUI offenses for women. But despite the increase among females, men continue to account for the vast majority of drunk driving arrests. In 1998, 676,911 men were arrested for being under the influence, compared with 626,371 arrests in 2007.
More than 126,000 women were arrested for DUI in 1998, a number which increased to 162,493 in 2007. Laura Dean-Mooney, president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, said it's not clear why there has been an increase in the number of women arrested for impaired driving. "There's no hard data on that. What you're hearing more is that women are under more pressure, they're now perhaps the breadwinner because of the unemployment rate," she told reporters with the Associated Press.
"We need to make sure women understand that if you're a drinking driver, you're just as likely as a male to hit or kill or injure someone or perhaps even kill yourself, as we saw in the horrible Taconic Parkway crash," Mooney went on to say. In the incident that Mooney was referring to, a woman named Diane Schuler drove the wrong way for nearly two miles on the Taconic State Parkway late last summer before her minivan slammed into an SUV, killing 8 people in New York's Westchester County. Schuler, her 2-year-old daughter, three young nieces and three men in the SUV were killed.
Schuler's 5-year-old son survived. Police said they found a broken bottle of vodka in the wreckage of Schuler's minivan. An autopsy found she had a 0.19 blood-alcohol reading at the time of the crash, well above the legal limit of 0.08. Making matters worse was the fact that she had smoked marijuana no more than an hour before the wreck. Transportation officials said the number of impaired women involved in a fatal crash increased in 10 states from 2007 to 2008.
The states are: Ohio, New Hampshire, Montana, Nevada, Wyoming, West Virginia, Indiana, Washington state, Kansas and Tennessee. About 2,000 alcohol-related deaths involve women every year. Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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