Is a drink driving killing murder?

We have become increasingly concerned with road safety since the days of horse and cart. Sooner or later there will be harsher punishments for drink drivers. It's time we made more effort to prevent them from playing Russian roulette with others' lives. It would be worthwhile to put life imprisonment on the table for drink drive killings in Australia, whatever the legal technicalities and whether labelled as murder, manslaughter or given a euphemistic description.

Of course drink driving is just one dangerous driving behaviour, and drink drivers are merely part of a broader alcohol and drug problem. This is a reason to address those other issues, not to be soft on drink driving.

Alcohol causes much more harm than tobacco. While both drugs cause a range of cancers and problems, smoking doesn't lead to violence or to the same degradation and degeneration as alcohol, and smoke driving deaths are rare.

Banning tobacco advertising has reduced smoking. Advertising bans, and compulsory plain packaging and warning labels are effective and inexpensive measures which should be implemented in both the alcohol and tobacco contexts, industry complaints notwithstanding. Education may be useful to reduce drink driving, although it cannot replace punishment if punishment is deserved.

Countries such as Brazil, China, India, Poland, Russia and Sweden and many others already have legal driving alcohol limits of 0.03% or less. The Australian limit should be reduced to 0.03% or less. Clearly, steps need to be taken to reduce the chance of another 100 million deaths from drink driving worldwide in the next few decades, and this might be a start, along with more significant penalties than the current trivial punishments which often apply for drink driving.