I saw this Snopes thing come in this morning about this 18yr drunk girl who stole her father's Porsche and within three minutes drove to her death.

Do not click this unless you really want to! I have warned you, this is not a joke, the pictures are NOT funny!!

First thing I thought after thinking "oh shit her face came off" was "they should show that to youngsters who drive drunk". It was graphic enough to make an impact to me even, and I have seen a few gruesome things. Those pictures sure stay with you.

They should show them to those caught for drunk driving kids and hope they get the message. As far as I am concerned, include it in the programs for drunk driving. If it keeps one kid from drinking and killing him/herself and/or others, then it did some good.

Of course.. who thinks about that when they HAVE drunk a lot. Drunk folk know better than anyone else. But yeah.. those "walk-alongs", those doing it to look "tough" might be turned about.


But my main question is: how graphic ARE those programs, are they at all, and how graphic should they be? I have never driven drunk in my life, heck I don't even drink in the first place so... I would love to know more and hear more about this, and your opinion of course

that is horrible! i don't want to even drive, much less while drinking.
i wish i could be more informative regarding drunken driving programs, but i don't know much about them. laws vary from state to state in the united states. i know that in my state (new hampshire) that are fines and/or jail terms and classes and/or loss of the drivers license.
the severity of the punishment is supposed to depend on whether a person has a history of repeat offenses, etc.
a lot of people don't take it very seriously. a guy in manchester continued to drink right up until the officers confiscated his beer.
it's nice to know that people's lives are in the hands of assholes like that.

Sounds like your law is about the same as ours. The worse the offense, the worse the punishment, and indeed also up to taking the license away. For however long is something the office of justice will determine.

But yeah, there will always be those folks who couldn't care less about the consequences. On those folks the programs will have no effect at all.

Thank goodness that there are not THAT many drunk drivers around. They are still the exception.

In California, if you are arrested for underaged drinking, your license is taken until you are 18 (sometimes 21)--car involved or not. You may also have to take classes and pay fines. In the class they show you photos of people who have died as a result of alcohol abuse. During my visit these included: A baby boy beaten to death by his drunk parent, a teenaged girl who choked to death on her own vomit, a couple who were have a fight while drunk and driving (without seat belts), a drunk motorcyclist who was impaled by pipes hanging the back of a truck on the freeway. That's all I can remember. I don't remember how graphic they were, but they were disturbing.

Not the shiniest achievment of my life (and just so you know, I wasn't driving a car or anything).

And I didn't click on the link because...I just don't want to see that stuff, the whole face off description is good enough for me.

Ahh.. I didn't know that they were that graphic already. A good thing if you ask me.

And I'm not judging you.. all the judgment you get from me is the fact that by what you are telling me things have changed, that is a good thing.

(unless I am getting you wrong and I am now caught with my foot in my mouth )

Problem solved: she's no longer underage

Yeah, that solved a lot of my problems.


I did dumb stuff when I was a teenager, I probably regret all of it. But I also recognize that it isn't just my good experiences that have made me who I am. I like to believe that <i>all</i> of my experiences have made me a better person.

I don't think I regret anything I ever did

I'm not sure if I'm a non-regretable type or I just didn't do anything regretable...

oh!
plain-wrap, i hope you don't feel that i inadvertently called you an asshole. i certainly didn't mean it as a personal attack towards any of our members.
i get mostly frustrated with hearing about repeat offenders. when i start hearing about people who've had convictions (the last one i heard about was someone that had 13 or 14 convictions and still ended up getting his license back), i feel frustrated about the effectiveness of our system.
and i've had to deal with far too many people, involved my life, with alcohol problems in general.
it's really frustrating.

of course, i've done my share of stupid things when it comes to alcohol. i can remember hitchhiking when i was 14. my friend and i were desperate to get home on time and a person pulled over to pick us up. we jumped in and discovered about a half mile down the road that this person was crazy drunk. and we laughed so hard we were crying ( because we were stoned out of our gourds) every time he went through a stop sign, drove off the road several times, up over curbs, you name it. i didn't realize until later on in life how stupid it was. on my part and his. i was lucky to make it home alive and i have no idea whether this man made it home since he was a stranger.
to this day when i think about it, i am mortified. thank goodness for growing up and getting smarter.
i think most of us do things that aren't too smart, especially when we're young.
what counts is what you learn from it, i believe.

I didn't think that at all. I think I've come to accept that I was young and in retrospect I could have been worse. I didn't hurt or kill anybody or myself.