...but we're still counting

Three years ago, it took a combination of exceptionally deadly and high-profile highway crashes to jolt this community out of its casual attitude toward the problem of impaired driving.

In the space of four months in 1999, Greater Lafayette witnessed a fiery crash on County Road 350 South that, in the blink of an eye, ended the lives of three people; then we mourned the death of Tiffany Young, a 21-year-old member of Purdue's national champion women's basketball team, in a crash in Gary.

Both wrecks were caused by men who chose to drive after drinking far more alcohol than they could handle.

Because of the tragic proportions of the first crash, witnessed by one of the innocent victims' parents, and the sports prominence of the victim in the second wreck, both made front-page news.

About that time, we in the Journal and Courier newsroom began to become aware of the sad frequency of fatal drunken driving crashes that were touching our community -- one about every two weeks.

It had escaped our attention, partly because of the routine way in which we treated those cases -- usually with a brief story on the Local page with minimal, if any, followup.

So we started investigating, documenting -- and, yes, spotlighting -- the fatal impaired-driving cases that touched the people in our communities.

In that one bloody year, 1999, impaired driving took the lives of 30 people who either lived or traveled among us.

In this column, we made a pledge to our readers -- like it or not -- that we would no longer treat impaired driving fatalities routinely.

"Let's start to quantify the pain, the responsibility, the devastation of drunken driving. Starting today," was our message on Oct., 10, 1999.

Today's front-page look at the impact of the year-old law that dropped Indiana's legal blood-alcohol threshold for driving from 0.10 percent to 0.08 percent is the latest product of our 3-year-old commitment to deliver the grim truth about this pervasive problem.

Thankfully, this year, the news isn't all bad.

Police, prosecutors and advocates agree the campaign to educate the public about the law change has been successful. Seemingly, every Hoosier knows that 0.08 is the law.

And research by Journal and Courier reporters and editors, while it may have missed a few cases, indicates a dramatic drop in the rate of fatal crashes affecting our communities. Last year, only 12 such fatalities were confirmed -- a far cry from 30 in 1999 and 21 in 2000.

For those who have lost loved ones, though, the recent months have been no less tragic. They still contemplate dreams unfulfilled, words not spoken -- fathers, sons, brothers, mothers, daughters, sisters and friends who never made it home.