Impaired driving is one of the biggest dangers on the planet. Specifically, the two greatest threats are driving under the influence and texting while driving. Driving under the influence had a near grave influence on me when three of my best friends got into a crash. One night my friends went to a party and asked me to come with them. I had baseball practice the next morning, so I turned dow n their offer. The next morning during practice I snuck a look at my phone to see that I had two missed calls from my best friend, Wes, and his older sister. In that moment, he called a third time, and I picked up. Wes immediately discloses that three of our closest friends all crashed the night before and were hospitalized.  I got permission to leave my practice early, and a couple minutes later he came to get me so we could support our friends. 
      The story I was told from that accident was that the girl driving the car was under the influence. She was speeding up a hill, lost control, and proceeded to slam into a brick wall. All of my friends had serious injuries but one in particular had the worst. He had internal bleeding and was in the hospital three weeks longer than all of the other people involved with the crash. Driving while either being drunk or high will always compromise lives. All your senses are numbed and your overall ability to make decisions are shot. The majority of the crashes I’ve heard about are easily avoidable if the people driving had stayed sober.  
      Another common impairment I see frequently is texting while driving. It's become such a normal thing to do that most people don’t realize that it is a dangerous thing to do. When you text while driving you are shifting your focus to something else, and with that shift you don’t realize what is happening around you. You are no longer being a defensive driver.  I’ve never been in or heard of a crash involving texting while driving but I have had some close calls. 
     One day, I was driving with my friend on the freeway heading to practice, and he was texting. I had my eyes glued on my phone so I wasn’t paying attention either. I felt the car shifting to the right, but I assumed he was getting over into the right lane to make the exit. We heard loud honking, and in that moment, he realized how far he had shifted over so he jerked the wheel to the left so we could get back in our lane. To be honest, I’ve been in so many of those situations I can’t recall them all.  
      Driver's education and defensive driving courses could help people realize the dangers of driving while impaired. If someone drives while impaired and makes it to their destination and back no problem, then they are going to want to do it again. But no matter how many times you “get away” with driving while impaired it’s always a life and death risk, compromising peoples safety. Educating people about these risks would help them realize that being impaired and driving don’t mix well together and should be avoided at all costs. 
     The role I can play to prevent impaired driving is to have a no tolerance rule for myself. That's got to be the base rule before I try and stop others. I can prevent others driving impaired by recognizing if anyone around me has been drinking or doing drugs and take their keys. Then, I can help prepare a safe way to get them home so that they don’t take that risk of driving while impaired. Another way to prevent impaired driving is to plan in advance a designated driver in your car/friend group.  This planning puts people in a much safer environment and lessens the risk of something dangerous happening. 
     Furthermore, in order to prevent texting while driving, one can enable the setting on their phone that doesn’t let you respond to texts while the car is moving. Another way would be to have the person in the car with you respond to necessary texts for you so that you don’t have to take your eyes off the road.
There are also other impairments to safely driving such as exhaustion.  Driving while tired is extra dangerous because you can fall asleep without even knowing. If someone seems too tired to get behind the wheel and drive, then have someone else drive. If there isn’t an extra person to drive for them then taking a nap before they get on the road needs to be a priority for everybody’s safety. 
      Driving in a state where you can’t safely drive, puts you and everyone else driving around you in danger.  Impaired driving is something that is always talked about, but rarely taken seriously. As a nation we need to come together and find ways to drive more responsibly so that we can keep everyone safe.