TOUCHY SUBJECT
Should drivers with ‘personality issues’ be banned?
If you had the power, who would you yank off our roads? This discussion got very real recently, when, on Dec. 29, 2014, Russia announced a new proposed law that appeared to severely limit, block or remove the driver’s licences of citizens who had personality disorders.
They referenced the World Health Organization’s (WHO) section ICD10 in their decree. Most headlines focused on the more clickbaitish segment of the designation: sexual disorders.
“Transgender people banned from driving,” appeared in The Guardian. “Russia bans transgender people and other ‘deviants’ from driving,” said the International Business Times. “Russian says transsexuals unfit to drive,” announced Al Jazeera, while the BBC went with “Russia says drivers must not have ‘sex disorders’.”
ICD-10 is full of fun stuff. It’s here you’ll find your pedophiles and your problem gamblers, your Munchausens and your schizophrenics. Your bipolars (caveat: I am bipolar), your exhibitionists, your compulsives and your transsexuals. It even scoops up pyromaniacs and kleptomaniacs. The Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights helpfully ran a picture of a man performing in drag to let everyone know some of their favourite entertainers wouldn’t be allowed to drive to their gigs.
Reading the list, it became clear to me that Russia has solved any gridlock problems it may have had in one fell swoop. It also immediately reduced its brutal fatality rate that hovers around 30,000 annual road deaths in a population of about 143 million. By comparison, the U.S. experiences about 33,000 fatalities per year in a population more than twice that of Russia, at about 316 million. If followed to the conceivable letter, the new law meant there would be nobody left on their roads. And here I thought it was all about the vodka.
With a lightning speed backlash from Human Rights organizations and LGBT groups around the world, not to mention nearly every mainstream media outlet, the Russian government quickly put a few shims into the proposed law; they would only be enforcing legislation if someone suffered “chronic and prolonged mental disorders with severe or persistent symptoms.” Sounds more than fair. Instead of a widespread blanket ban, only those a psychiatric commission deems incapable of driving will be barred.
I would totally trust a Russian government agency. Absolutely. A government run by a man who still insists that Russia’s invasion of Crimea was by invitation, like a wedding or something. If 5,100 people (to date) die at a wedding. I don’t fault the world’s media one iota for shooting back at the dangerous and homophobic wording of the proposed law.
Russian Health Minister Oleg Salagi says this will affect less than 1% in the “disorders of adult personality and behaviour” category. Further fuzzy areas were sharpened slightly: while the original wording would encompass — and ban — amputees, officials admitted that they could keep driving their specially equipped cars. I can find no further clarification for the proposed law also forbidding those under 150 cm tall (4-foot-11) from driving. I currently have a Micra in the driveway; it would make someone 150 cm tall look like Gulliver.
While the world media has focused on the hot button topics of Russia possibly forbidding transsexuals, transgenders, fetishists, and exhibitionists from obtaining a driver’s licence, the equally problematic catch-all of mood disorders remains in play. I guarantee if you stand in the centre of the five people closest to you and throw a pebble, you would hit someone living with a mood disorder, if it’s not you. To imagine people avoiding getting help because a diagnosis may cost them their driver’s licence is a giant step backward as well as futile. We’re everywhere.
Maybe Russia thought it could slide this one by us. After all, Saudi Arabia has been front and centre on the stupid driving laws for years. A woman was recently given 150 lashes for being caught driving while female, though that nation is currently “considering proposals to allow women to drive,” according to something called the king’s advisory council. “The recommendations ... to change the law would apply only to women over 30, who must be off the road by 8 p.m. and cannot wear makeup while driving.” That deadly mascara.
When I write about seniors, I get mail saying they should be off the road. Ditto when I write about teens. Same holds true for parents with kids in the car, BMW drivers, angry men, motorcyclists, cyclists, taxi drivers, certain nationalities and people who have bumper stickers. Basically, everybody thinks nobody should be on the road.
While I would happily sign anything trying to introduce better driver training and more comprehensive testing, I still see Russia’s proposed law as dangerous and Saudi Arabia’s as just batty. Civil rights and human rights matter.
I spent a morning dropping the Russian document into a translator to get as much information as I could directly from the source. Under a preponderance of wordage about what they should do about their drunken driving problems, one sentence leaped out: “We need to learn foreign practices.”
Judging from those fatality rates, it would be a start. Just not Saudi Arabia’s.
I still see Russia’s proposed law as dangerous and Saudi Arabia’s as just batty