Several people in the Sanford School of Public Policy want to help prevent people from making poor decisions when they drink.
Although they may not care whether people who imbibe keep their clothes on, Philip J. Cook, professor of public policy, and Maeve E. Gearing, a doctoral candidate in public policy, want to keep them off the roads.
Cook and Gearing co-authored an op-ed article that ran in the New York Times Monday about ignition-interlock devices. These devices are breathalyzers that attach to the ignition of a car and will prevent the vehicle from starting if the driver is intoxicated, which if widely used could save as many as 750 lives a year, according to a National Highway Transportation Safety Administration report estimate.
Currently, eight states require drunk-driving offenders to have ignition-interlock devices installed in their cars and 25 states require repeat offenders to install them, according to the article.
But in 2007, only 146,000 ignition interlocks were in use, they wrote, adding that the reasons were clear: the devices are expensive to install and there is little enforcement or oversight of their installation.
The authors suggest courts connect installing ignition-interlock devices with substance-abuse treatment requirements and only allow offenders to remove the devices when they do not try to start their cars while drunk over an extended time period.
“The ignition interlock could be an extraordinarily effective way to prevent drunk-driving recidivism,” Cook and Gearing wrote. “But it can save lives only if we make sure people use it.”
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As the year begins, before work piles up, Duke students have a lot of free time on their hands. Different Dukies do different things to fill the hours, most of which don’t make it on to a police blotter.
But sometimes, Duke students get drunk. And when they do, they don’t always make the best choices.
In the latest instance of drunk Duke student shenanigans, Duke Police found an intoxicated student sans clothing (yes, naked) in McClendon Commons around 9 a.m. Friday. According to the police report summary, an officer escorted the student back to his room.
Ten days earlier, Duke Police discovered a naked intoxicated student passed out near the Fitzpatrick Center for Interdisciplinary Engineering, Medicine and Applied Sciences, which students know as CIEMAS, at 2:12 a.m. No word on what the student was doing over there so early on a Tuesday morning. The student was taken to the hospital.
Sometimes, however, drunk naked Dukies are a bit more active. Have a look at this police report from April:
“I witnessed two subjects running from the Kilgo Quad area towards the Bus Stop. The male subject was completely naked with the exception of his hat and holding his boxers in his hand. The female subject was wearing only underclothes. The two stated that they had been at an unknown room in Kilgo Quad playing beer pong and had lost the game and as a result had been asked to run to the bus stop naked.”
When the officer encountered the students, he “asked the male subject to please put on his boxers,” the report states. After getting the students’ information, the officer let them go and get dressed.
The two did not get off scot-free. The students were not arrested, but a Dean was advised of the incident, the report notes.
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