The European Commission decided to fund new studies into the causes of road accidents, independent of any legal investigations, especially when the causes of those accidents constituted criminal acts, as is the case when the driver is driving under the influence (DUI). Italian law permits such an absolute separation if and when a health professional assists their patient, as in the case of alleviation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This intervention implies the description of every single detail of the traumatic event for a positive health outcome. Therefore, psychologists carried out confidential interviews with persons who were emotionally involved in 241 road accidents and were able to identify the characteristics of the drivers who caused these accidents. In Italy, official road accident statistics are produced by the Police. However, the sample described here also includes accidents not recorded by the Police, allowing a separate analysis on a group of accidents not previously studied. The interviews also provide a detailed description of accidents that involve driving under the influence, which is not always recorded in the Police figures. When an accident had been recorded by the Police, the interviewees always described the official reports as a more or less appropriate account of the same accident. The comparison between the two accounts of the same group of accidents provides a statistical confirmation to a hypothetical estimate produced by researchers of the Epidemiology Department of the Italian Health Ministry on the real prevalence of DUI, much higher than reported by statistics derived from Police reports. In the course of a neutral offer of psychological support, those who were believed to have blood alcohol concentrations over the alcohol limit were involved in accidents twelve times more frequently than is reported in statistics derived from Police reports, where only 2% of the road accidents were attributed to the effect of alcohol. Even greater is the differential for the prevalence of driving under the influence of drugs and medicines, which was only 0.3% in the official statistics, but was found in just over a quarter of cases in our sample. These confidential interviews also enable comparisons between the role of the impairing substance(s) as part of lifestyle (i.e. general use of substances), driving style (i.e. use of substances before driving), and as a contributing cause of the accident - all three for the same driver. These results provide a baseline for an evaluation of existing policies and their future adaptation to the drivers’ characteristics. So far, only the improvements in Blood Alcohol Concentration detection appear to have produced some clear separation between drinking habits, drinking-and-driving behaviour and this cause of accidents. Unfortunately, this improvement has been stronger for the lighter drinkers, with little effect on the heavier drinkers. Even the impact on DUI of other impairing substances is widely ignored, as well as the worst mode of consumption - mixing alcohol, prescribed medicines, and illegal drugs. These results suggest that further research is needed to better understand the ways in which these factors affect DUI behaviour. Examining the interviews, it appears that the law against DUI is seldom enforced, therefore hiding DUI in the official statistics. These guilty drivers prefer to be blamed for other accident causes, even when another driver is the real culprit, so distorting further the official statistics on the causes of such accidents. The use of confidentiality in interviews therefore appears to be an important way to answer to the request of the Commission to determine the real causes of road accidents, independently from legal processes and all the related official records. Ironically, this separation from legal processes could also help to improve criminal prosecutions, by enabling a better understanding of the consequences of the accidents. (Author/publisher) This document is available at https://www.bast.de/Druid/EN/Home/home_node.html
Abstract