Content Warning: Mentions of addiction, alcohol abuse and fatal accidents.
I’m going to say something that I believe to be perfectly, wholly rational. So rational, in fact, that I would be surprised if every person reading this didn’t agree with me. The problem here is that I’m not even sure my closest friends would agree.
Drunk driving is dumb and immature.
Now, look, I don’t want to come off as some pompous moralist, standing here on my platform preaching about how you should all listen to me and my infinite wisdom because I think breaking the law is bad. First, that’s annoying. Second, that’s not actually how I feel.
So, to curb the preachy tone, let me explain.
When my scofflaw friends and I first discovered substances in high school, we felt like we were having more fun than anyone else in the world. White Claws and cheap weed yielded pure magic in those days. That magic lasted for about a year, before one of those friends crashed his sedan, waking up in the hospital with no real recollection of the event except for a Volkswagen insignia bruised into his forearms from the airbags deploying.
Nobody else was hurt, and he ended up all right. He got healthy, did his probation and the rest of us had some tough conversations.
“Man, he got lucky,” we would say. “This should be a reminder. We have to be safer.”
After that, we were safer — then we weren’t.
Last winter, another friend found himself in the hospital after rolling his car into a ditch.
He, too, recovered from the accident, and nobody else was harmed. Like before, it reminded us of the fire we were playing with, if only briefly.
I say briefly because shortly after the accident, a third friend spent the night in jail after he got pulled over and blew a blood alcohol concentration that was twice the legal limit.
These three friends are people I love dearly, and they’re not the only people I love who have gotten behind the wheel while drunk. A number of other friends have driven drunk and gotten lucky. Each time it happens, I hope it’s the last.
Gauging by my anecdotal, lived experience, it’s possible — and probable — that my peers engage in high-risk drinking more often than other people our age, but I’m not the only one feeling like this behavior is too normalized. Drunk driving among people my age is more than anecdotally common: it’s statistically common, too.
College-aged drivers (ages 21-24) were among the most likely to be involved in a fatal drunk-driving accident, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation. In 2021, among drivers involved in a fatal accident, 27% of them were drunk beyond the legal limit. Among 15 to 20 year olds, my age bracket, 17% of drivers involved in fatal crashes were drunk. There would be nothing sadder than to see someone I love become a part of those statistics.
I recognize that high-risk behavior while drinking is more complex than making a singular bad choice. In each situation, this behavior is a combination of circumstance, a lack of safer options, brain chemistry and pseudo-confidence. It’s wrong to look at these events, dismiss them as plainly stupid and move on. That’s not my goal. My goal is to look at why drunk driving happens, and why it’s such a painful thing, especially when it’s someone you love behind the wheel.
Get this man his keys!
In recent months, jokes satirizing drunk driving have become relatively popular. Frankly, they’re kind of funny. Post a video of an obviously drunk person? Someone will surely comment, “Get this man his keys.”
Other versions of the joke include T-shirts that read “God’s drunkest driver,” or photos of keys captioned “a way to make drinking more fun.” So far, I realize I might be coming off like a Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer, but I still think some of these memes are funny.
The line separating satire and reality is a thin one, though. And earlier this year, when I heard “Get this man his keys!” shouted at a house party, I resigned to my moralist ways once more, because somebody gave that man his keys, and desperate for a “booze ’n cruise,” he drove himself and others to Taco Bell.
So what happens when you give a guy his keys?
Dan Qualls, a behavioral health therapist in Grand Haven who specializes in addiction, explained what happens behind the wheel and why drunk driving is such a difficult problem among young people. On a psychological level, he said, alcohol doesn’t just affect one’s judgment; it can anesthetize their anxieties to the point that they may actually feel encouraged to get behind the wheel. When young drivers are drunk, they “actually feel like they are more capable of driving, which is kind of an oxymoron,” Qualls said in an interview with The Michigan Daily.
He explained, as many parents, health teachers and psychology professors have told me before, that the prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain responsible for decision-making — usually doesn’t develop until the early 20s. It’s basic psychology: When you consume alcohol, a drug that inhibits the prefrontal cortex, young people are likely to make poor decisions — like driving.
“It doesn’t matter who you are or what your tolerance is, that a relatively low level of alcohol, judgment is going to be affected,” Qualls said. “Particularly with young people who often feel bulletproof to begin with.”
What if we’re not bulletproof?
A rising sophomore in college spoke with me about drunk driving. In an effort to respect the privacy and safety of grieving loved ones, the source will remain anonymous. Last year, a friend of his died while drunk driving. The night I reached out to him, a somber reminder of his dead friend sped past him while he was at a traffic light.
Last week, a car screeched its tires and raced past him at a red light, crashing about 100 yards in front of him. He and his friends approached the car to check on the driver. When they got close to the car, they saw a familiar bumper sticker, displaying a singular jersey number.
In the student’s hometown, everyone knows what these stickers represent. Last year, the student’s friend, one of the town’s beloved football players, rolled his car over a barrier on a causeway. He died a few hours later from his injuries. He was drunk.
Hours before his death, his high school held a senior send-off, where students presented videos recapping their high school experiences. In one video, students gave a mock tour of the house they frequently partied at. One of the parts of the house they jokingly showed off was the lockbox where they hid the victim’s keys.
“They would take his keys and they would literally put them in a lockbox,” the student told me. The night he died, he said, “was the one time it didn’t work.”
It was the night before senior skip day, and everyone had been out partying that night, he said.
“Everyone knew he was going from one party to another, so it was kind of unspoken that everyone knew he was drunk when the accident happened,” he said. “It was a very difficult time to come to that realization because literally the night before we had a joke about it. It was awful.”
It’s been more than a year since his friend died, and it was obvious to me that he still carries pain with him. I asked him how he feels about the influx of jokes about drunk driving, and I learned quickly that the jokes can resurface that pain within him.
“This is complete, honest with you, not just amping this up: I had TikTok for years, and I deleted it because I kept getting (drunk driving videos) up on my page,” he said. “I would report them, you know. I don’t want to see this.”
In his hometown, joking about drunk driving has become taboo since his friend died. Fights have broken out between his friends — relationships have been strained since the victim’s death.
“Every time you hear a joke, it just makes you think about him,” the student said. “Why would someone ever want someone else to go through that? Not just the person who gets directly injured or jailed, why would someone want the people around them to be so hurt by that?”
I could sense a tangible, deeply-rooted pain in this student as he talked about his friend. It was a feeling I have almost known — something I don’t ever want to feel.
An angry compassion
Qualls refers to addiction as being a “hijacked brain.” Young people, Qualls said, are particularly susceptible to their brains being hijacked, regardless of how developed their brains are. For addicts — and not all drunk drivers are alcoholics — whether or not the prefrontal cortex is fully developed can be unimportant.
Even when the prefrontal cortex is developed, “addiction circumvents that and goes to a deeper part of the brain — a part of the brain that is really primitive,” Qualls said, explaining that willpower and intelligence are nonfactors in the psychology of addiction.
“Addiction really doesn’t give a crap how you think or what you feel. It affects a part of that brain that’s reptilian — a brain that just does,” he said.
That reptilian brain is hijacked not only by substances, but by the experiences and feelings that follow substance use, especially for people with low self-esteem, high anxiety and other general burdens. Substances like alcohol can lessen these inhibitions and cause people to “feel like they fit on the planet more than they ever have before,” something Qualls called “a remarkably powerful reinforcer.”
Qualls has worked in the field of addiction since 1978, and for nearly 30 years, he conducted driver’s license assessments, a legal formality for many convicted drunk drivers. When someone is convicted of driving under the influence, their license can be revoked. In some cases, to legally drive again, a substance-abuse professional has to provide an evaluation of the driver.
While Qualls explained his time conducting driver’s license assessments, he categorized drunk drivers as a “cross-section of people,” calling the behavior an “equalizer, because not everybody coming through is an alcoholic.”
Some people — Qualls estimated about 20% of his clients — were people who have been remarkably responsible all their life and simply made a mistake. For these people, this is usually their last offense. Another 10 to 15%, he said, are people who are chronically alcoholic — owners of a hijacked brain. The rest, about 75% of drunk drivers, are at a crossroads between high-risk drinking and steering clear of danger. For those, he hoped the evaluation may be the “wake-up call.”
I’m not a therapist, and I don’t pretend to be, but I think many of my peers reside within the wake-up call camp. They may not be alcoholics, but they’re driving down the wrong road, and they’re doing it drunk.
I’ll refrain from any diagnostics, but as Qualls went on about the nature of addiction, he spoke exactly to some of the behavior I’ve seen in people I love.
“The brain isn’t our friend,” he said. “The disease creates delusion, it distorts reality. If you’re around an addict and you listen to them talk about their experience, it’s going to be dramatically at odds with that which everyone around them sees.”
He continued: “The persistence of that delusion — it just can’t be fathomed. It is a Matrix type of experience. It is a separate reality.”
How does anyone get over that?
Qualls, a recovering addict himself, explained that recovery can feel impossible without drastic changes to an addict’s lifestyle. Contemporary understandings of recovery advocate for spiritual healing, physical wellness, lifestyle changes and cognitive behavioral therapy to counteract the undesirable behavior. Making sure an addict is surrounded by supporting people is paramount, Qualls went on to explain.
“Addiction is remarkably isolating,” he reminded me. “Even the most social addict is a remarkably lonely person.”
Addiction is in my blood
I’m a child of two recovering alcoholics. I’ve been lucky enough to grow up with sober parents my entire life because they both cleaned up years before I was born. When I’m at my parents’ house, I often wake up to the sound of my mom or my dad introducing themselves as alcoholics to their virtual, morning Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.
My mother is more than sober, too; she is actively engaged in aiding others along the path of sobriety as a substance-abuse therapist like Qualls. She has spent her life working with addicts as they try to get sober. Sometimes, when my mom is working with convicted drunk drivers, I go to work and help her.
On some Saturday mornings, I sit behind a counter in a shoebox-sized therapist’s office in Muskegon and screen clients who are applying to have their previously-revoked licenses reinstated. I give them basic paperwork and questionnaires about their addiction history. Sometimes I give them a drug test. I quickly learned that the people who came into that office — some who had been convicted of homicide for operating while intoxicated — weren’t abominable. They were imperfect and flawed, but they were uniquely human.
I found myself being deeply compassionate toward the people who would come into my mother’s office, almost to a fault. Today, I find myself compassionate toward people like the football player who lost his life too soon.
Empathizing with people who have killed or people who have played with the lives of others so recklessly is a strange feeling, but when viewing their behavior through a psychological lens, I somehow understood. For many of them, their brains were hijacked.
This compassion, though, was something I was unable to feel toward my closest friends. I was just mad at them; reasonably mad, but solely mad. I am reminded that sometimes, empathy can be easier from a distance.
This is a lesson I am still learning. When I began writing this story, part of me was incredibly bitter with the people I love for behaving the way they did. I still hold some anger — I think I will hold that forever — but that feeling has been trumped by a sadness. I am in no way defending drunk drivers, but I am advocating for a level of empathy for them. I see their mistakes for what they are: mistakes.
Statement Correspondent Liam Rappleye can be reached at rappleye@umich.edu