SY19-4 * NEW EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION IS EFFECTIVE FOR REDUCING DRUNK DRIVING

Abstract

Since the prevalence of alcohol use disorders is high among cases of drunk driving (DD), it is said that treatment interventions should be directed at preventing DD. The National Police Agency introduced a specialized two-day lecture program including Brief Intervention (BI) for drivers whose licenses had been revoked at four out of 47 prefectures in 2010. Once the driving license was revoked, he/she was compelled to attend a two-day lecture before retaking the driver's license examination. Before the new program was introduced, all of the traffic offenders attended the same lecture regardless of the reason for the revocation of their drivers' licenses. In this presentation, we compare the efficacy between the new and previous programs. In 2010, 10,745 traffic offenders participated in the lecture (681 were in the new program, while 10,064 were in the conventional program). We compared the rate of traffic offences within a year of attending the program between the two groups. The prevalence of arrests for DD and other traffic offenses in the subjects of the new program were 0% and 15.6%, respectively, while the corresponding figures for participants of the conventional program were 0.54% and 20.9%. These results suggest that BI had deterrent effects against repetition of all traffic offenses including DD, and that the treatment program should be adopted to deter DD. Language: en