According to an in-depth study by Zutobi, Maine has a lot of drunk drivers.

Let's start with the good news. Driving Under the Influence (DUI) incidents are trending down. But we are a long way from it not being a major problem and a major reason for road accidents and road deaths in the United States each year.

In 2019, according to a report by Zutobi, alcohol-impaired road fatalities accounted for nearly a third of all fatal road crashes in the US, which is a staggering 10,142 deaths. But back in 1985, alcohol-impaired fatalities accounted for 41% of all road fatalities. In 2019, that dropped to 28%.

In Zutobi's report, they note that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that a driver with a blood alcohol content of .08 will have trouble concentrating, maintaining speed, will have short-term memory loss, a hard time processing information, and will have impaired perception and judgment. Even a BAC of .05, which is within the legal limit, will affect your coordination, reduce your ability to track moving objects, affect how well you steer, and reduce reaction times.

Here's how Maine ranked:

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Here's how Zutobi came up with their numbers. They used ‘persons arrested data’ from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Alcohol-impaired crash data was found through the NHTSA crash data tool. Then they calculated the DUI Severity Score by first creating a normalized score out of ten on the factors “DUI arrests per 100,000 drivers”, “DUI road fatalities per 100,000 drivers”, and the “DUI road fatality ratio”, and then taking a final average score across all factors to discover the overall score for each state.

The data also showed that younger drivers were more likely to drive drunk. As we head into the holidays, with parties back on - just be careful. We need all the listeners we can get.