In a weird epiphany of sorts, I was knocked back to my senses when I had a crazy car accident last week. Everyone with common sense knows that drinking and driving just do not mesh, yet many alcohol drinkers ignore this. In my case, the law of averages finally caught up with me. I had numerous occasions where I would reach my home at wee hours of the morning not knowing how I got home drunk. Being a normal folk with no driver, I drive myself to wine tasting events, parties and everywhere all the time. I dodged a few dozen potential accidents, but this time I was hit. It was more like I hit something…. I rammed into my defenseless garage. Minor bruises aside, it was my car and garage that were badly damaged, and my ego that was more hurting than the physical side. Well…. the pocket hurts very much too.

This incident made me curious about existing Philippine laws on drunk driving. Do we have a law on Driving Under Influence of alcohol or drugs (more on the former) or DUI? We hear this all the time in the US with big name celebrities like Mel Gibson, Shia LaBeouf, Lindsay Lohan, and numerous professional athletes caught with DUI charges. A strict DUI law is a protection to both the drivers of the vehicles, and more so for the unprepared public. Drunk driving is just courting accident to happen. There is actually no real acceptable alcohol level for safe driving. Technically, alcohol creeps in on the nerve cells of the brain by interrupting the link between nerve cells and all other cells, affecting the nerve pathways (defined as a bundle of nerve fibers following a path to the brain that communicates with other parts of the body)—it suppresses the activities of excitatory nerve pathways and increases the activities of inhibitory nerve pathways. In layman’s term it just means alcohol intake will slow down the overall reflex responses and negate any control we have over our body.

Outdated drunk driving law

The only law we have in the country concerning drunk driving is in the motherhood Republic Act 4136, also known as the Land Transportation and Traffic Code. This was enacted into law way back during the time of former President GMA’s father, President Diosdado Macapagal in 1964. In my thorough search for provisions on drunk driving in this extremely long Republic Law, I chanced upon only two sections which mentioned driving while under the influence of liquor.

Read this full article here.