This Is the State With the Biggest DUI Problem

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 27, 10:30AM EDT

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This Is the State With the Biggest DUI Problem — © Bromus inermis (Fallon County,... (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Matt Lavin

Drunk driving has been a problem for decades. It began to be seriously addressed in the early 1980s, particularly because of the founding of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving). The group fought to bring down the blood alcohol level needed to be arrested for drunk driving and for laws that more severely punish people who drive drunk. The number of drunk driving fatalities did drop considerably from 18,125 in 1985 to 9,865 in 2011. However, the figure has started to rise again. It reached 11,654 in 2020.
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Another figure that has changed over the past four decades is the percentage of traffic fatalities caused by drunk driving. It 1985, drunk driving resulted in 41% of all fatalities. That fell to 30% in 2020.

Drunk driving deaths also change considerably by age. Most are among younger adults. Among people ages 21 to 24, the figure is 26.4% of all drunk driving deaths. Among people ages 25 to 34, the figure is 26.0%. This drops to 7.1% among adults over 74.
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The recent The US DUI Report – The States With the Most and Least Drunk Driving from Zutobi, an online drivers education resource, broke down drunk driving statistics by age, year and state. It pointed out that drunk driving is defined by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration as a person with a blood alcohol of over .08. However, it also pointed out that “Even a BAC of 0.05, which is within the legal limit, will result in reduced coordination, reduced ability to track moving objects, difficulty steering, and reduced reaction times.”
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The study’s researchers created a drunk driving severity score by state. The calculation involves the percentage of road fatalities caused by drunk driving on a per 100,000 resident basis, drunk driving arrests per 100,000 people and the change in drunk driving deaths between 2019 and 2020. Most data came from the Fatality and Injury Reporting System Tool (FIRST).
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The state at the top of the list was Montana, with a score of 84.1 out of 100. The next three states are in the same region of the country. South Dakota had a rating of 80.4, followed by Wyoming at 78.7 and North Dakota at 74.8

The state with the lowest score was Delaware, at 27.9.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.