Preventing drink-driving and reoffending: the experiment conducted in French department of vald’oise (1996-2002

An experiment aimed at improving the medical care given to drivers who have been found to have excessive blood alcohol levels (over 1.4 g/l) by roadside checks has been set up in the Département Val d’Oise.The aim is to ensure that these drivers receive medical attention at the earliest possible stage in the administrative and legal process in order to encourage some of them to receive treatment and help the judges decide what type of punishment is appropriate in each case. INRETS has assessed this experiment and come up with two sets of findings: the first relate to the development of criteria for describing the long term operation of the experiment on the period 1996-2000 (number of drivers counted at each stage of the process), and the others relate to an analysis of how judges have responded in terms of sentencing (based on in depth surveys of judicial records (1997-1998)).The target population (inhabitants of the department with a blood alcohol level>1.4g /l) consists of about 600 drivers per year; about 70 % of them came to an appointment with a doctor specialized in alcohol-related problems before they were sentenced. Almost 60 % of those had an alcohol problem that required treatment. It appears that repetition of the offence of drink-driving is three times more common among those problem drinkers (37 % of cases) than among occasional drinkers (13 % of cases). Compulsory treatment, which was unusual before this experiment, became consistently a way for judges to react to those with a medical problem. Almost one third (32.5%) of those drivers who required medical treatment were sentenced to compulsory treatment (in addition to a probation order and/or disqualification from driving). In contrast, it is apparent that occasional drinkers are often disqualified from driving but almost never sentenced to compulsory treatment