As a teenage driver, impaired driving is one of the scariest facts on the road. An extremely common offense, countless drivers drive while texting, under the influence of alcohol or other drugs, or when extremely tired, which puts everyone on the road at risk. These decisions could mar their lives and the lives of many around them. 

When deciding to put your key in the ignition and pull out of your driveway, you are responsible for so much more than most realize. The cost of getting on the road is ensuring your safety, and the safety of others. By deciding to get on the road, you must assess, every time, whether you are truly fit to drive responsibly. An emotional day, a bad phone call, a small problem on the road: all of these could cause impairment. What many students, and many drivers, do not realize is that impaired driving means more than just driving under the influence; driving impaired means irresponsible driving. One of the most powerful things that was told to me when I started driving was that it only takes five minutes to pull over and call someone to drive you home, or five minutes to collect your thoughts, but it takes a lifetime to deal with the aftermath of impaired driving. 

An issue with the general understanding of impaired driving is that most people only consider impaired driving as driving while drunk. While alcohol can impair your driving ability, even one drink, so many other things can cause you to drive unreliably. Being tired, texting, being on any type of illicit drug, alcohol, antidepressants, drugs with certain side effects, melatonin, emotions, or being distracted are all excellent examples of impaired driving. Another issue is that many people do not understand that any amount of alcohol or drug will impair your driving, and slow your reaction time, effectively giving you less time to think and respond in a worse-case scenario, and more likely to make a bad decision that gets you into the aforementioned situation. For many students, it is fear of reaching out to a sober adult, or paying for a rideshare service. For these people, it is important to be reminded that it is better to be in trouble with an adult, or with the law, than to put yourself into a situation that could end up injuring yourself and others. In the case of texting, there is no situation in which a text or a phone notification is more important than your safety and the safety of everyone else on the road. No text is ever that urgent, and if it is, the option to pull over and respond is always available. Additionally, you can always hands-free call them on your car’s speaker, and receive the contents of the message and respond, in that way. 

Once we educate all drivers on the importance of understanding these aspects of impaired driving, we can hopefully decrease the amount of deaths related to impaired or distracted driving. Additionally, more intense legislation, especially around texting and driving is important to enforce this, and will save lives. In my home state, Michigan, we have very strict cell-phone usage laws while driving, and if more states in the US were to enact them, we would be dealing with a lot less casualty. 

Personally, despite doing our part of not getting behind the wheel impaired, we can lend a hand to others who might decide differently. We can offer to be designated drivers for those who are impaired. We can urge others to call another driver to drive them when necessary. We can avoid texting others when we know that they are driving, and utilize phone calls more often. We can remind others that after one drink, one hit, or one dose of any drug, that we are impaired drivers and should not drive under any circumstance. We can also remind those under the influence of drugs that it is hard to evaluate themselves and their sobriety, and the safest bet is to avoid driving all together. We can educate others on the dangers of impaired driving, and lobby for our representatives, schools, and educators to do the same. We can rise together as a community to petition our representatives to act on this problem, promoting more intense legislation to ensure all drivers’ safety on the road. 

All in all, we as a society need to join forces to tackle this extreme problem. Driving, already an extremely dangerous route of transportation, need not be any more dangerous. By taking these steps, we can change the world of driving forever.