Panel urges lower blood-alcohol level for driving

Restaurant, bar owners worry patrons may stay home

Bar and restaurant owners are concerned that a recommendation to reduce the blood-alcohol level for drunken driving from 0.08 to 0.05 percent could have “a chilling effect” and cause patrons to stay home.

The recommendation was part of a nearly 500-page study released Wednesday by a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Medicine and Engineering. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration commissioned the study in 2016 after alcohol-related traffic deaths climbed for two years in a row after plateauing at just over 10,000 for several years.

The report makes recommendations such as increased alcohol taxes, limited hours for alcohol sales, stronger controls on alcohol advertising content and marketing, and wider use of ignition locks and sobriety checkpoints.

But the most significant recommendation is reducing the blood-alcohol level for drunken driving from 0.08 to 0.05 percent, which could be two beers for a man who weighs 150 pounds.

“Our apathy toward 29 alcoholrelated deaths per day is unacceptable, particularly because these tragic events can be prevented,” committee chairman Steve Teutsch, a senior fellow for health policy and economics at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, wrote in the study’s introduction.

The panel said drunken driving has been “virtually eliminated” in

some of the 35 countries that are part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that have adopted similar restrictions and programs. The countries are all democracies that use a market economy.

The panel said research shows that drivers start to become impaired when their blood-alcohol level reaches 0.05 percent, and that should be enough to prohibit them from driving.

“Every time I hear something like this, it scares me,” said Kevin Joyce, owner of the Carlton House restaurant Downtown and past head of the state restaurant association. “I don’t know the science, but I think 0.05 is aggressive … especially for a small person.

“Myfear is the people who feel they can’t have a glass of wine with dinner may just stay at home.”

John Longstreet, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association, agreed.

“Our fear would be the fear of patrons not understanding how much alcohol they can consume,” he said. “It could have such a chilling effect that they don’t go out.”

If the lower blood-alcohol ratewere approved, Mr. Longstreet said, his organization likely would have to launch a marketing campaign to assure customers they could have a drink or two without breakingthe law.

“It’s frankly in nobody’s interest to send somebody out driving who’s had too much to drink and that’s the last thing we want to do,” he said. “But we’d have to tell