Blaming the wrong things

[DrFaroohk]

It's usually when it comes to some sort of drugs. For example, one could look at my forgetfulness and say "well that's all the pot you smoked." Except I had the problem long before I ever discovered the little green herb. So unless pot developed the ability to travel through time, it's not really the problem is it?

Sleeplessness. I have a hard time falling asleep. "It's cuz you drink a lot of coffee all day!" I do drink a lot of coffee. But even when I didn't drink coffee, I still had the problem.

Or it can be a specific event. Like if you get into a fight with someone, and the police get involved and it turns out you had alcohol in your system, your charge gets all trumped up and you have to go to AA and therapy and stuff because "Alcohol was involved." But I think that if you can't show a correlation, how can you assume it was related? Just because alcohol was in my blood when I punched someone in the face, it doesn't mean the alcohol had anything to do with it. I might have punched him anyway.

Anyway, stuff like that. People shouldn't just make connections that aren't there.

[Hyena Dandy]

The alcohol one makes sense, to me. I mean, alcohol lowers inhibitions. That's the whole point of it. So I can see that part.

The pot one is not a reasonable connection, its just that people are told a lot of pot makes you forgetful. The coffee one... I mean, people tell me that about Red Bull all the time. But I've had insomnia since I was about four.

[Greenday]

Reminds me of Dante Stallworth's case. He drinks and drives, then hits and kills someone. Since he was drinking, it was obviously his fault. Doesn't matter that the jackass he killed ran across the street when it wasn't light out. Or that is was a very busy highway and you'd have to be a moron attempting for a Darwin Award to just rush out across the highway. But since he had a few drinks, it's his fault someone ran onto a busy highway when it was dark out.

[Ree]

I can sort of see the point you're making Greenday.

The driver could have driven safely home while under the influence of alcohol...no harm done. Nobody would ever have known nor been affected by it.
Unfortunately, someone ran out in front of him.

In that case, he hits the guy and kills him.
Now the world knows he was drinking and driving.

Did the accident happen because he was drinking?
Probably not.
The fact that the driver was drunk doesn't negate the pedestrian's idiotic move of running across a busy highway in the dark.

There is also the "what if?"

If the driver had been sober, perhaps his perception and reaction time would have been less muddled by the effects of alcohol, and he might have avoided hitting the guy, regardless of the fact that the dude was making a really stupid and dangerous move in the first place.

We will never know if the outcome would have been different had the driver been sober, because that didn't happen.

The sad fact is, he was drinking and got behind the wheel, which is against the law.

[DrFaroohk]

That's it - we don't KNOW. And it just seems wrong and terribly unfair to assume the worst when you don't KNOW. You can easily find out if the alcohol led to the pedestrian getting killed by just reconstructing the scene. So Stallworth had alcohol in his blood - was it enough to impair his response time enough that the pedestrian might have lived? These things can be figured out by just doing a slight amount of WORK and INVESTIGATING. Not just assuming the worst because you're too damn lazy to actually figure shit out.

[Greenday]

While alcohol may have had an effect, it just bothers me that the police, instead of putting any blame on the guy running across a busy highway, just blamed the alcohol.

[Andara Bledin]

While alcohol may have had an effect, it just bothers me that the police, instead of putting any blame on the guy running across a busy highway, just blamed the alcohol.

Hey, they blame the person merging onto a street for any accident that also involves through traffic, despite any unsafe maneuver the through traffic might have engaged in.

There are certain default positions that it behooves one to know before engaging in any potentially dangerous endeavor. In the case of drinking and driving, if you drink and drive you are automatically judged at fault for any incident that happens. If you don't like it, then you'd better not drink and drive.

Speaking of blaming the wrong things, however: Rising health care costs. Turns out, it's not smokers or fat people that cost the most. It's healthy people.

During the last 10 years of a healthy person's life, it costs 1/3 again to take care of them than over the entire life of an unhealthy person, who will normally have died by that point. It's the end-of-life diseases that cost the most to care for.

^-.-^