The only good thing about drunk driving is that virtually everyone - barring the most hard-core chronic drunks - agrees that it's a bad thing. You don't get that much of a consensus on most issues. You could add "drunk driving" to the old quote about "Son, try everything in life except incest and folk-dancing."

Use of cell phones - particularly handhelds - and especially texting on them, however, produces very comparable casualty rates, and many people who consider themselves careful and law-abiding drivers do that constantly. I think we need strict laws there as well. But many politicians and other "important" types are among the worst offenders, so we aren't likely to get them.

Peter.

(Full disclosure: I have driven drunk quite a lot. It was all a generation or more ago, and I was young and stupid - as opposed to old and stupid, but more conservative, as I am now - and it was not taken as seriously then as it is now. And I was terribly lucky, as were those on the highway with me. But I have never used a handheld cell phone while driving a vehicle. If only because cell phones didn't exist when I was young enough to think I was invulnerable.)