Drunken driving—sometimes called America’s social accepted form of murder—has become a national epidemic. Every hour of every day about three Americans on an average are killed by drunken drivers, adding to an incredible 250,000 over the past decade.

A drunken driver is usually defined as one with a 0.10 blood alcohol content or roughly three beers, glasses of wine or shots of whisky drunk within two hours. Heavy drinking used to be an unacceptable part of the American macho（男子汉气概） image and judges were lenient（宽大的） in most courts, but the drunken-slaughter has recently caused so many good-publicized tragedies, especially involving young children, that public opinion is no longer so tolerant.

Twenty states have raised the legal drinking age to 21, reversing a trend in the 1960s to reduce it to 18. After New Jersey lowers it to 18, the number of people killed by 18-to-20-year-old drivers more than doubled, so the state recently upped it back to 21.

Reformers, however, fear raising the drinking age will have little affect unless accompanied by educational programs to help young people to develop “responsible attitudes” towards drinking and teach them to resist peer pressure to drink.

Tough new laws have led to increase arrests and tests and in many areas already, to a marked decline in fatalities. Some states are also penalizing bars for serving customers too many drinks.

Although the fatalities continue to occur daily in every state, some Americans are even beginning to speak well of the 13 years national prohibition of alcoholic that began in 1919, which President Hoover called the “noble experiment”. They forget that legal prohibition didn’t stop drinking, but discouraged political corruption and organized crime. As with the booming drug trade generally, there is no easy solution.

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