Giving Compass' Take:

• J.B. Wogan discusses the continuing trend of alcohol-related deaths and policy recommendations for reducing the impact of the drug on the American people.

• How can philanthropy help prevent addiction and drunk driving deaths? How has the conversation around opioids impacted perceptions about alcoholism? 

• Find out how Minnesota is reducing highway deaths. 

When the federal government started counting alcohol-impaired traffic deaths in 1982, there were more than 21,000 a year. By 2011, the death toll was down by 53 percent. States had raised the legal drinking age to 21 and adopted a common rule that a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of .08 meant “too drunk to drive.” Many states also mandated the installation of interlock devices to prevent those with a history of drunken driving from turning on their ignition unless they were sober. Those laws, coupled with education and prevention campaigns, helped reduce drunk driving deaths to fewer than 10,000 in 2011.

But recently the trend has stalled. The total number of alcohol-impaired traffic fatalities actually rose in both 2015 and 2016. “Drunk driving has been around since the automobile was invented and it’s still the biggest killer on the highway,” says J.T. Griffin, the chief government affairs officer for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). Indeed, alcohol causes more traffic deaths per year than either speeding or driving without a seatbelt.

In January, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a report about the causes of the problem and potential solutions.

The report provided a package of policy recommendations, one of which was for every state to lower the legal BAC limit from .08 to .05. In practical terms, that would mean most women couldn’t drive after two glasses of wine in an hour; most men couldn’t drive after three.

Up to now, no state has imposed a limit of .05, but that’s about to change. Utah will go to .05 in December. In the past year, Delaware, Hawaii, New York and Washington state have also considered legislation to lower the limit.

The national conversation around addiction has been dominated in recent years by opioids. Certainly, the rapid rise in opioid overdoses, which claimed 42,000 lives in 2016 alone, is a pressing issue for states across the country.

But the fact is that alcohol kills roughly 88,000 Americans each year, more than double the number of opioid deaths.

Read the full article about alcohol by J.B. Wogan at Governing Magazine.