From a very young age, especially approaching teenage years, I was told, “Don’t get in a vehicle with anyone under the influence.” As we grow up, I am sure that everyone has been told this for a time or two. We see stories every day about deadly crashes and road deaths involving alcohol. However, impaired driving goes beyond the loud and towards the “silent killers.” Especially in teenagers, the brain hasn’t developed to understand all the risks until it’s too late. Until the lesson is already learned by a harsh truth and reality sinks in, we walk blissfully unaware of danger.  

The” silent killers” expand to driving with intense fatigue, texting while driving, and even driving with intense emotional distress. I think as humans, we forget about these simple examples of impaired driving due to how common they are, so we forget it’s even dangerous. We tend to normalize these things by saying “I am tired but it’s okay because I only will do this once.” Then it becomes the next time “I know I said I wouldn’t drive tired, but I have to get home.” Until it becomes reoccurring, eventually a habit. We normalize these impairments so much until it’s not a problem anymore. Another example of this is emotional distress. Have you ever gotten into an argument with someone and said something you regret? Especially as teenagers, we tend to get something I like to call “tunnel vision.” Tunnel vision is when you are so clouded by your emotions that everything continues to build on that thing and affect your judgment. How does this apply to driving? This is a lot of where cases of road rage comes from.

 As I am writing this, it has become so clear to me that although I can sit here and write about the risks that come with drivers, I am not above anyone else in this sense. I took Driver’s Ed, like every single teenager, to get their license, and honestly, I can’t remember the course even talking about fatigue while driving. I remember hearing tons about the importance of speed limits and not driving if you’ve had alcohol, though. I think this is where we “fail.” We generalized “impaired” as being under the influence of some type of drug or alcohol, but being impaired involved anything where you are not fully conscious or in your right mind to make proper decisions. And unfortunately, a lot of people learn this lesson too late.

When I think of impaired driving, I think back to 2018. I was staying at my grandma’s house for the weekend while my parents were on vacation in Michigan. Only 10 at the time, I was woken up and being told, “Your parents were in a city bus accident last night.” My dad was rushed into surgery and the ICU where he has continued to suffer with consequences from that night. But why? While my parents were driving back from the hotel, the driver of the city bus plowed through a stoplight into the car with my parents due to fatigue. Now, almost 7 years later, my dad has lost 40% of his hearing in one of his ears due to the impact. He broke 4 ribs along with his sternum. To this day, he has had multiple surgeries that involved fusing his neck vertebrae just to give him more comfort. Even though I was young at the time, this story still makes me sick. While I am tremendously grateful to still have my parents with me, this could have had a very different outcome. But instances like this happen every single day. Just a few days ago, in Las Vegas, there was a crash involving 12 different vehicles, leaving 2 people dead on the scene. A few days before that, a pedestrian was hit while walking on a crosswalk due to a driver texting. All of these instances within one week, in one community alone.

So,o how do we fix this for the future? This question puzzled me for a while. How do we spread out such a common message and actually get people to listen or act? When we think about human judgment, we think about the brain’s capacity to weigh risks and rewards. For example, impaired driving. The reward is answering your phone or texts 5 minutes faster, but you’re risking your life. The brain doesn’t recognize that because we have a mindset of “it won’t happen to me, I know how to drive.”  In order to prevent impaired driving, we have to start from the bottom up. We have to start with our new drivers learning from the old, from their experiences. I think Nevada Driver’s Education and traffic school courses should make it MANDATORY to attend a meeting or listen to a video of real experiences and accidents caused by the less talked about forms of impaired driving. I am talking about emotional distress, fatigue, and texting while driving. Seeing how it impacts the victim or the family, creating an emotional bonding that sticks and hardwires into your brain more than reading a sentence or two ever would. As a community, as a single person, I can spread awareness, correct my friends. The more we talk about it, the more discussions we have, the more the true message of safe driving is spread.