The statistics I’ve seen make alcohol clearly the leading cause of fatal car accidents.
I’m not at all sure how sound these statistics are. What I usually see are claims that a very high percentage of the total number of car accidents are “alcohol-related.” However, whenever I try to find out how exactly an accident is determined to be “alcohol-related,” the definitions turn out to be murky and spurious, or even outright ridiculous. For example:
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the U.S. defines a fatal crash as alcohol-related if either a driver or a non-motorist had a measurable or estimated BAC of 0.01 g/dl or above.
So, these people take the percentage of all fatal accidents in which not everyone happened to have flat-out zero BAC, and later use this number as if it represented the percentage of fatal accidents actually caused by drinking. This is obscene even by the usual standards of lying by statistics.
Oh, and I forgot to address this part:
I’m not at all sure how sound these statistics are. What I usually see are claims that a very high percentage of the total number of car accidents are “alcohol-related.” However, whenever I try to find out how exactly an accident is determined to be “alcohol-related,” the definitions turn out to be murky and spurious, or even outright ridiculous. For example:
So, these people take the percentage of all fatal accidents in which not everyone happened to have flat-out zero BAC, and later use this number as if it represented the percentage of fatal accidents actually caused by drinking. This is obscene even by the usual standards of lying by statistics.