Some sobering thoughts for 2011

Well, First off I'm going to try to do a post on SOME topic every few days that seems opinion or news worthy, like it or not ;)

First one is the story referenced above (http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/112734649.html) about the alcohol related crash in September 2010 near Whitewater WI that took the life of 6-year old Treyton Kilar and injured 3 other people. The driver of the other vehicle had a blood alcohol level over twice our states legal limit (0.191 - legal limit here in WI is 0.08).

Here are some sobering statistics from the Sate of WI Department of Transportation - and they are NOT good:

• 44,000 convicted in Wisconsin in 2009 for having made the decision to drive drunk. That figure pales in comparison to the 26.4% of Wisconsinites who admitted in the 2008 National Survey on Drug Use and Health that they drove under the influence in the last 12 months - a number that dwarfs the survey's national average of 15.1%.
• The Kilar crash was just one of 367 drunken driving cases prosecuted in Walworth County in 2010.
• With the highest drunken driving rates in the nation, Wisconsin endured 6,429 alcohol-related car crashes in 2009, more than half of which caused injury.

 44,000 CONVICTED for DECIDING to DRIVE AFTER DRINKING...no one put a gun to their head and forced them to drive THEY DECIDED TO DRIVE. This tells me somehow we as a state and population here are missing something. That's more than the population of MANY CITIES in THIS STATE. Just another thought for you the ENTIRE population of the Wisconsin Prison system - every last inmate - per the The Wisconsin Department of Corrections as of June 30 there were 22,171 inmates in the system.

So that's MORE THAN DOUBLE the total prison population EVERY YEAR....and they don't get out and start over counting on 1/1/11....folks lets face it here in Wisconsin we have a problem with alcohol and driving and its long past time we retire the phrase "one more for the road: I think that the Kilar Family would probably agree with me as well.