Liquor lobby fights to shut down sobriety checkpoints

Brendan Buhler

Wednesday, June 7, 2006 | 7:37 a.m.

A Washington lobby group that represents the liquor industry is attacking sobriety checkpoints and other anti-drunken driving efforts as ineffective, leaving local restaurateurs and cops shaking their heads.

The American Beverage Institute issued a press release Monday demanding that police agencies focus as much effort on catching negligent drivers - including ones who are sleepy, distracted or reckless - as they do on catching drunken drivers. Police, it said, should stop using their resources to man "misguided" sobriety checkpoints.

The ABI lobbies on behalf of restaurants and the alcohol industry. The group complains that Mothers Against Drunk Driving has shifted from discouraging drunken driving to discouraging any drinking before driving. The ABI refers to MADD as "modern-day prohibitionists."

Drinking isn't an issue when a member of the party is a designated driver, said Laurie Kendrick, general manager of Table 34 restaurant.

And she, for one, supports sobriety checkpoints.

"As a taxpayer I think these are a good use of my dollars."

Motorists who have consumed just one drink are not in danger of a DUI arrest, Nevada Highway Patrol spokesman Kevin Honea said.

"They have to fail the entire battery of field sobriety tests. They have to fail the preliminary breath test as well as an evidentiary test, whether it's blood or breath. And only then are they booked on DUI charges. There's pretty much no feasible way for anyone to get arrested on one beer."

Two hundred and sixteen people were killed in alcohol-related crashes in Nevada in 2004, which is the most recent statistic available from the Transportation Department. In the same year, the Nevada law enforcement agencies arrested 9,521 people for driving under the influence. Four out of five arrestees were men and many of those arrested were in their 20s.

There were no data on how many were arrested at sobriety checkpoints.