If you drink, don't drive.

The message has a distinctly familiar ring, but that's where similarities to past drunk-driving campaigns end. This year has marked a seismic shift in efforts by law enforcement groups, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other safety organizations to halt the behavior that accounts for 39% of traffic deaths.

Alcohol-related traffic fatalities fell dramatically between 1982 and about 1994, largely due to the efforts of MADD as well as laws to lower the drunk-driving limit to a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.08 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood.

But that trend has stalled. Since 1994, alcohol-related driving fatalities in the United States have plateaued at around 17,000 per year, and, in California, between 2004 and 2005 they inched upward.

Traffic-safety advocates say they have stepped up efforts to stop drunk driving , but have not made much progress, says Susan Ferguson, senior vice president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit, scientific and educational organization dedicated to reducing crashes on the nation's highways. "It was time to revisit this," Ferguson says.

Posted 12/18/2006 Los Angeles Times