According to the NHTSA, NTSB, and MSF, almost half of all fatal motorcycle accidents involve alcohol. That's about twice the average for car drivers. Why is this such a problem, and why has nothing thus far been successful in stopping it?

TRANSCRIPT
Greetings and salutations to each and every one of you out there and welcome to another installment of the podcast. Man-oh-man, do we have a hot and controversial moto-topic to discuss today. This is something I have wanted to discuss for a long time but wasn't exactly sure how to approach it initially, and you obviously know what I'm driving at already, presuming you read the title. We're gonna talk about drinking and riding in this episode. Any reasonable person out there should agree that riding impaired is an absolutely terrible idea. But lots of motorcyclists do it, and at a rate almost twice that of car drivers. Why is this? Well, in hopes of answering that question, what I want to touch on and discuss today is the popular notion put forth by certain interests in the motorcycle world –– and one that is regularly, sometimes religiously proselytized –– that consuming any amount of alcohol over any period of time while out riding your motorcycle is unacceptable and irresponsible. For many, many years, I was the guy who would tell you emphatically, that notion was true. But is it, and is that attitude actually somehow contributing to the problem of riding impaired? We'll talk about from exactly where I believe that argument might derive. Along the way we'll dig into some of the science and the social morays comprising this issue and attempt to look at it as objectively as possible.

Okay, so first, a foreword to all of this: The hard data comprising the number of motorcycle crashes that involve the consumption of alcohol on someone's part is compelling. As some of you know, I spent about a decade teaching motorcycle safety courses for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation through the Texas Department of Public Safety's Motorcycle Safety Unit, and I am well acquainted with this information, and with the frequency of alcohol-involved motorcycle accidents according to agencies like the NHTSA. The numbers are riveting, and they likely are a big part of why certain members of the motorcycle community are so quick to slap a scarlet letter on anyone who stops for a beer when out on his or her motorcycle.

Let's go over some of the statistics, but then let's do some critical thinking. The first and most hypnotic stat is that in almost half of all motorcycle fatalities, the deceased rider is found to have some amount of detectable alcohol in his or her system. According to the NHTSA, it's between 45 and 47 percent. Also, according to the MSF, alcohol is involved in over half of all accidents involving a motorcycle on some person's part; maybe it's the rider or perhaps another involved party. Lastly, a quarter of all fatal alcohol-related motorcycle crashes involve motorcyclists running off the road, overturning, or falling from the motorcycle rather than striking another object.

So, just by virtue of this data, it would certainly seem that alcohol use is damn-near ubiquitous in the motorcycle world. On the face of it, motorcycle riders as a whole apparently like to drink alcohol, and at a higher frequency than that of non-riders. But why? After all, alcohol is only a factor in 28 percent of fatal traffic accidents where motorcycles are not involved. What makes riding and drinking go so well together, and is it completely impossible to combine these two activities safely?

I have a theory on this. Firstly, we know that motorcycle riders tend to be thrill-seekers and risk takers in their own rite. Even the safest, most conscientious rider accepts and manages a higher level of risk than the average motorist, and is –– at least in part –– doing so for the reward of the endorphins and dopamine riding a motorcycle provides. It's a wonderful feeling. If you ride a motorcycle, you know exactly that feeling I'm talking about. It's one of those mental states you get from riding a bike that makes the experience impossible to articulate and explain to non-riders. The thing is, we see similar compulsion in all risk takers, from high-stakes gamblers to wing walkers. And what is an almost universal propensity within this personality type? You guessed it –– substance abuse. The characteristic of risk taking or novelty seeking is one personality trait that is very often found in persons who become addicted to drugs and alcohol. One study even showed that if thrill seeking and low harm avoidance are shown in 11 year olds, boys in particular have a 20-fold increased risk of abusing alcohol by age 27.

Dopamine seekers, endorphin seekers, they can easily be drawn to both motorcycles and alcohol for a lot of the same payoff. Some of these are even the same people who, after kicking alcoholism or drug abuse later in life, will become gym rats. They channel their addictive behavior into cardio and weight training because they will always need those endorphins and that dopamine but are now getting it in a less harmful way. That is my theory on why so many motorcyclists drink, and is perhaps why they like combining the two activities with such frequency.

Alright, with all that in mind, back to the original question: Is there a way to solve this problem without telling this demographic of riders, "Hey man, you better not have one drop of alcohol while out on your motorcycle." Because obviously, that doesn't work, does it? Hollister was over 60 years ago and motorcyclists are still drinking and riding despite organizations like the NHTSA, MSF, MADD, etc., using anti-alcohol scare tactics for decades. I'm sure half of all riders aren't alcoholics, so wouldn't it be better to provide motorcyclists with a realistic look at how to safely combine the activities of riding and having a beer without getting on the bike impaired? Can it be done? It's an iconoclastic and heretical thought to even utter, I realize.

When you drink alcohol, it goes to pretty much every part of your body, including your heart and brain. This is where it has the most noticeable affects. You become slightly high and relaxed, and your blood pressure and pulse lower. Eventually, the liver breaks the alcohol down into acetates and is expelled. Depending on the size and ethnicity of the person, that process usually takes about 40 minutes to an hour per average-sized drink (such as a beer). After that point, there is no alcohol in the person's system. It's gone.

So I know this is gonna sound very taboo, but it seems to me that it's perfectly okay to meet your riding pals somewhere for a beer or two, enjoy some fun and conversation, then wait the appropriate amount of time for the alcohol to become acetate in your system before climbing back on your bike and going home or wherever. You just need good information and enough discipline to be able to do it successfully. If discipline fails and you drink a little more than you planned, leave the bike there and get an Uber. It's okay. There's no shame in it. In fact, it should be respected. But that's not what is being taught and encouraged in this age of zero tolerance, political correctness, and nannyism mentality. The general narrative is that the problem is so big, that any amount of alcohol on a ride day is completely irresponsible and should be avoided or the motorcyclist is a bad person. And I'll tell you straight up, that attitude doesn't sit well with or encourage responsible drinking among the ranks of the thrill-seekers. You can forget it. It falls on deaf ears every time and influences no one to be more responsible with alcohol while out on a ride. It's immediately blown off as being goody-goody or prude or puritanical, which should be obvious when considering that the problem hasn't gotten any better since, well, ever.

There is no encouragement to understand alcohol as a chemical and how to manage it, and there's no emphasis in the argument on alcohol's effect on us as individuals. That's hugely important. In fact, we're not even really allowed to be individuals anymore, which is perhaps another subject altogether, but pointing out the differences between individuals has become dangerous business in recent years. In some places you're not even allowed to point out the basic difference between males and females. So imagine someone pointing out that one of the factors greatly determining alcohol metabolism in individuals is race and ethnicity. Forget that it's a fact based on genetics; you're just not allowed to point this stuff out anymore, and that's how we get to where we are on an issue like drinking and driving or drinking and riding a motorcycle. You can't talk about anything other than the legalistically safe, socially acceptable solution to the problem, which is always one-size-fits-all. The fact is that individuals all react to alcohol differently based on gender, weight, genetics, race and ethnicity, among other things. A BAC of .02 or even .05 might have close to zero discernible affect on one person while it smashes someone else into drunkenness. But we've removed the personal responsibility dynamic from these issues and governed them with cookie cutter logic, and so the problems continue to get worse.

Any sort of positive change with regard to this issue starts with knowing one's self and re-building a culture centered on personal responsibility with true consequences for screwing up. You wanna stop people from riding impaired or driving impaired? Emphasize and share all the information about alcohol more openly and remove some of the taboos. And sure, make the penalties for harming others through irresponsible action more dire and more frightening. But what if we were to approach riding impaired like we approach teaching safer sex practices to teenagers. How well did teaching abstinence work compared to being real with teens about safer sex? Well, pretty much all that data is in too, and guess what? Teaching safer sex is more effective, like it or not. Yet, all 50 states have instead implemented largely abstinence-based sex education. I see a parallel situation with this whole impaired riding problem. What if we instead put more emphasis on practices and techniques designed to help riders make safer decisions about alcohol use rather than just telling them not to drink. I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, but as with safer sex education, it might actually make a difference for once.

By the way, I keep saying 'safer sex' instead of 'safe sex', because no such practice will ever be perfect. Mr. Webster defines safety as "the absence of risk", and we all no that virtually nothing in life is ever done in the absence of risk. Risk takers know this, and that's why they roll their eyes when you get up on your high horse and tell them they're terrible human beings for riding their motorcycles to the burger barn and having a beer or two with their lunch. Now granted, some idiots get blithering drunk and go for a ride, and I have no doubt that a certain amount of that behavior is reflected in the NHTSA and MSF data. But we genuinely need to approach this problem a different way.

Until then, drinking and riding is gonna continue to be a problem; as will a plethora of other social problems. In the meantime, don't dismiss the idea, just think about it. Maybe you are the one who'll come up with the solution.

Transcript copyright ©2019 Tim Kreitz • All rights reserved • No part of this transcript may be reproduced in any form or for any purpose without express written consent of the author