Response to Drunk Driving

The article about drunk driving prevention really got my thinking. I had no idea that the percentage of people who had been killed from drunk drivers was so extremely high. As college freshman, I think this article was a great piece to read and really understand. The author talked about how college students today use designated drivers and how that has become very widely accepted. After reading the article it brought back a memory from this past summer. My best friend Katie’s boyfriend had actually been in a pretty severe drunk driving accident. She called me one day near the end of summer and said that he had been in the accident.
When I asked if they knew who hit him I was shocked by her answer. She told me that he was the one who had been driving drunk. I knew her boyfriend for a while before this and it just seemed strange that he would do something that dumb to risk his own life. As she got deeper into the story, I learned that he had gone out and couldn’t get a designated driver, and actually fell asleep at the wheel and ended up crashing into a tree on the side of the road. He was pretty seriously injured, as I could imagine. He had a broken arm with bruises all over his body and a couple of fractured ribs. I kept thinking to myself, “what if Katie was in the car with him?” I went to visit him in the hospital with her the next day and he looked terrible. He said he was never going to do anything that stupid ever again and I believed him. He could have died and she gave him an earful about it. After all, that night he got in the accident was the night of his twenty-first birthday. Imagine that.
Reading this article really hit home for me. Not only had Katie’s boyfriend been in an accident, but I know many other who have been to, and some of them even fatal. I always was told to never drive drunk or get in the car with anyone who was in the slightest bit intoxicated, and I think after reading this piece and seeing it first hand, that I will be sticking to what I was taught.