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This ignores so many other effects of drunk driving. You get in a car drunk and manage to make it home without hitting anyone? Great. But only because you were lucky, and meanwhile you were increasing the risk to everyone else on the road. People like you will cause a higher number of accidents and fatalities, increasing the cost of everything from insurance to health care to everyone else. People will make have to make strategic decisions about when and where it is safe for them to drive (with their families) based on the knowledge that people like you can legally be blitzed on the highway and they can't do anything to avoid you except not share the road with you.
This is where I think most libertarian principles fail. Yes, you can take everything to the extreme that "if you might possibly impact someone else the law gets to regulate your behavior" and we end up in a hyperregulated safetyist society. There is a balance between public interest and personal rights. But it has to be a balance. You don't get to just live in a society and say "I can shoot guns in the air, the police can't stop me or do anything about it unless and until one of my shots lands on someone and kills them."
As a driver - alcohol is way less dangerous than sleepiness. I personally think that we should have field capacity tests - for reflexes and judgment. If you fail them no matter of the reason - inebriation, drugs, tiredness, old age - you get fined massively.
Anyway with self driving taxis now reality this discussion will probably be rendered moot.
Too many people would never pass such tests. Some people have better reflexes and judgement while impaired than other people have when awake and sober. The impacts of such a policy would also be too disparate.
Such people should perhaps not be driving then?
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