On drinking and driving

The Herald visited a few West End bars on recent Saturday nights, and found that some 20-something patrons also leave their cars home because Long Beach police officers are on the lookout for drunk drivers in the area. Conversations with bar patrons ranged from their plans for the night to their thoughts on driving while drunk, particularly in Long Beach. They spoke to the Herald on the condition of anonymity, and their names have been changed.
9 p.m., Big Kahuna
“I’m not going to tell you how to get around getting a DWI,” said Kyle as he sipped a beer and talked over loud music at the watering hole once known as the Tiki Bar. “If I tell you, then I’ll get caught.”
Kyle, a lifelong Long Beach resident who lives within walking distance of the West End bars, was at first hesitant to talk about the ways people try to avoid attracting the attention of police. “You want to know the truth?” he said with an air of authority. “You don’t want to get caught? Ride a bike.”
According to Kyle, drinking and driving isn’t an epidemic caused by young adults who are drunk by evening’s end. Many revelers are stopped by friends before they even reach for their car keys. It’s those who have had a couple of drinks but are still functional who are more likely to become DWI cases, Kyle suggested. No one stops a friend from driving if he or she has had only a few beers, he said. “They don’t think they’re drunk,” Kyle said. “But they really are.”
Judy Vining, coordinator for the Coalition to Prevent Underage Drinking at Long Beach Medical Center, called Kyle’s comments “pretty accurate,” but questioned what, exactly, he meant by “a few” drinks. “When I ask kids how much do they mean by a few drinks, do they mean two?” Vining said, “they say, ‘Well, no.’”
The coalition is a community organization comprising representatives of the police department, the Long Beach city administration, the media (including the Herald), local businesses, the clergy and the city’s schools as well as parents, and Vining heads a three-week education series for underage drinkers who have been issued tickets for activities such as drinking in public or using fake I.D.s to get into bars.
“I also ask what do they mean by ‘drink’ — do they mean a shot, or do they pour themselves a cup?” Vining continued. “That’s more like what they mean ... It’s not an innocent one or two beers. Kids drink to get drunk.”
10 p.m., Speakeasy
For many bar patrons, it only takes a few drinks to get drunk. A self-described “lightweight,” Theresa sat at a tall table along a wall at Speakeasy, sipping a vodka tonic, and admitted that after two of them she is “on the floor.” When Theresa goes out, she can’t drink much even if she isn’t driving because of her low tolerance for alcohol.
She explained how she walked one night to a friend’s apartment, and then, after she insisted on driving home, her friend and his roommate stopped her. “Do you know what his roommate said?” she asked. “He tells me this: ‘I don’t even like you … but even I want you to hang out right now. You know it’s bad when I’m telling you to stay.’ Can you believe that?”
Theresa said the frank appeal worked: She ended up spending a few hours relaxing at her friend’s apartment before driving home in much better condition. This night, she said, she was going to sleep there again.
Commenting later, Vining noted that it often takes others to stop drinkers from deciding to get in their car and drive. “It takes a village,” she said. “It takes somebody who watches someone stumbling to get in the car to pick up that phone and call the police. They’re potentially saving that person’s life and someone else’s life, too.”
11 p.m., the Beach House
“I’ve flown nearly 200 DWI missions over Nassau, Queens and Suffolk County roads over the past half decade,” said Mark, whose drink for the night was a Captain and Coke. “DWI is both dangerous and stupid. Like most things dangerous and stupid, DWI is also a tour de force thrill ride.”
Some might classify Mark as one of “those drunks” — a self-styled big thinker who talks a lot. As he talked, he slurred his words, having gotten a start on the night’s activities at a nearby block party a few hours earlier. Like Kyle, Mark broke the problem of DWIs down into a few categories. “There are nights that you’re ashamed of, when you wake up in your bed not knowing how you got there, imagining that perhaps your parents found you crawling across the street and carried you inside,” he said.
“What he’s really talking about is young people who have developed a pretty huge tolerance for alcohol,” Vining said later. “They drink a lot and drink consistently, and they endanger themselves as well as everybody else.”
Mark said he believes the legal threshold for drunk driving, a blood alcohol level of .08 percent, is “an astonishingly low number set by some zealot” who didn’t have a clue about the boundaries of impairment.
One figure the coalition uses is “013”: zero for underage drinkers, one drink per hour and a maximum of three per night. It’s the organization’s way of framing the issue of social drinking, particularly for people with low alcohol tolerance. “That is low-risk social drinking,” Vining said. “Honestly, kids I come across don’t know anyone who drinks like that.”
Rod, who shares an apartment with Mark in the West End, was also found roaming the bars one Saturday night. Rod, too, said he believes the drinking-and-driving law is a bit harsh, and added that he planned to walk home with his roommate — if he could find him at the end of the night. He said he was afraid of being pulled over for a DWI.
“Long Beach cops are strict,” he said, “... and they have undercover cars that are all white, so sneaky.” But Rod reluctantly admitted that their presence was a good thing, and that unlike other communities, there is no way to avoid Long Beach police by taking side streets. “There’s one road in and one road out,” he said.
Long Beach Police Department Lt. Bruce Meyer said the department is very aggressive in enforcing DWI laws, takes a zero tolerance approach, and uses various tactics to accomplish its mission, including special DWI patrols in marked and unmarked cars. Police also set up random DWI checkpoints on different days of the week and at various times, day and night, Meyer said.
Midnight, the Inn
“I hate it,” Michael, drinking Blue Moon beer, said of coming to the West End from his home in Baldwin. “That’s why I don’t usually come here. The cops are all over here, and you have to drive around to find parking. That’s why I go to the city a lot.” He said that when he drinks, he’d rather take trains to and around Manhattan than drive. “I don’t have to worry about finding a sober driver, or sobering up to drive,” he said.
Michael works on the North Shore, and during his weekday commutes he has noticed many police checkpoints after work on Fridays. He doesn’t mind them, he said, since he has never driven “drunk drunk.” He said he believes that if he drinks and eats at the same time, he may be a bit buzzed, but he is still able to drive.
On this night, however, he said, “I shouldn’t be driving” — though he planned to drive home later. “But I concentrate on the road.” He said he was going easy on the drinks for now, but if he felt like getting really drunk, he would probably call his sister to drive him home later.
“Some of the statements made by your interviewees bear out the effectiveness of the Long Beach Police Department’s omnipresence,” Meyer said. “We recognize we can’t be everywhere all the time, but we do feel that we are very effective in our enforcement effort.”
2 a.m., Swingbellys
“Maybe people hate taxis,” said Tammy. “Maybe that’s why they drink and drive. They don’t want to call a taxi. How do I know?”
Tammy lives in Long Beach, though she wouldn’t say what area. “If people here found out that I was talking about drunk driving, I don’t know,” she said. “I’d get blacklisted or something. Long Beach is like that.”
Tammy, who is in college but old enough to drink legally, said she has many Long Beach friends who drive drunk regularly. Last year on her birthday, she said, she drove home after a long night of partying. “I was trashed but I just decided that I needed to get home,” she said. “It’s a drunk decision. People do it.” She said she made it home safely that night but doesn’t remember the trip. “I woke up in my own bed and everything,” she said. “I was surprised that they didn’t find me sleeping on the lawn. I even parked my car.”
She recalled attending a party in the West End last winter, and leaving angrily after helping to polish off a bottle of tequila and arguing with her date. “He was being a jerk,” she said. “I didn’t want to stay. We were doing tequila shots all night, but still I got in my car. I was drunk. I didn’t care.”
Tammy said she had gotten an “inappropriately early start” on drinking that afternoon. Again, she remembered little of her drive home — other than seeing several police cars along the way. “I was just concentrating on the road a lot,” she said. “I drove slowly. I took side streets. They won’t pull you over if you aren’t doing anything wrong.”
Vining said that stories like Tammy’s are all too common among 20-something bar-goers, and the bottom line is that young people “have not gotten the message about the dangers of alcohol and drug use. They think social drinking is drinking to get trashed with your friends. They really don’t have the information or understand.”
One of the themes of the Coalition to Prevent Underage Drinking, Vining explained, is that the problem of young drinkers is something the community as a whole must work together to tackle. “We have to enlist the bar owners in a very positive way to not over-serve patrons,” she said. “We have to really step up enforcement. I think the police have, in terms of the underage drinkers ... And it takes us as a community to say it’s really
not OK.”
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 213.