Speed bumps
My letter to the editor of the Frazier Park Mountain Enterprise, in response to a letter writer’s urging of community support for speed bumps in Pine Mountain Club (about an hour north of Los Angeles):
Dear Editor,
Paul Puskar and Ronni Wilde have clocked cars doing 75 mph in a 25 mph zone in Pine Mountain Club. Such speeds remind me of Henri Paul, who drove himself and Princess Diana to their deaths at 90 mph in a 35 mph zone.
Henri Paul was a highly tolerant alcoholic whose blood alcohol level (BAL) was .18 per cent when he died. This is the equivalent of two bottles of wine, or twelve shots of 80-proof liquor in four hours for a 200-pound person. It’s enough to put any non-alcoholic on his face. Paul not only didn’t appear inebriated in the hotel video taken of him immediately prior to the tragedy; Diana’s bodyguard, who survived the crash, is reported as having said he didn’t know that Paul had even been drinking.
Alcoholics have a sense of invincibility when drinking heavily and, in some cases, between drinking episodes. Anyone engaging in unnecessarily reckless conduct, especially when endangering the lives of others, should be suspected of being an early-stage alcoholic and likely under the influence.
Alcoholics also have a Supreme Being complex, which creates in them a sense that “the rules are not for me.” Signs are meant to be violated; warning signs, particularly, serve only to fuel the alcoholic sense that they can do no wrong. While speed bumps may slow them down in one area, they will take risks with the lives of others elsewhere (such as the road from PMC to FP).
A more viable solution is for law enforcers to test every rule-breaking traffic violator for DUI. They can do this via a non-intrusive test of the eyes (technically known as “horizontal gaze-nystagmus,” or HGN) that takes at most 60 seconds for any trained officer to administer. Since early-stage highly-tolerant alcoholics, like Henri Paul, don’t appear inebriated at BALs ranging up to .24 per cent (and can even pass standard sobriety tests), many more arrests for DUI will be made. Since DUIs are the most effective legal intervention, this will also serve to get more alcoholics sober, before tragedies such as those involving Princess Diana happen on the roads of PMC.