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COMMENTARY: The back story of anti-drunk driving campaigns

Earlier this fall, in Charlottetown’s Joe Ghiz Park, MADD Canada unveiled a stark and striking monument to honour Islanders who have been killed by impaired driving. To family members who mourn their deaths, and to all of P.E.I. society, this monument is a poignant reminder of the senseless tragedy of this loss.

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Alcohol kills about 17,000 Canadians annually. About three per cent of these deaths are caused by drunk driving. The other 97 per cent of alcohol deaths are triggered by cancer, by other diseases, and by a range of physical and mental traumas.

If a second monument were erected to honour all alcohol victims, and scaled to the number of deaths, the second monument would be larger than the first.

To understand why some alcohol victims are honoured with a monument while most are not, we need the backstory of anti-drunk driving campaigns. That story starts in 1983, when Labatts Brewery was riding high as FCanada’s biggest beer-maker, and sharing its bounty by gifting three free beers to sustain nightshift workers to quitting time, and then two more to moisten the drive home.

But sharp-eyed Labatts executives spotted trouble on the southern horizon, where an upstart outfit called Mothers Against Drunk Driving was raising a ruckus about drunk driving carnage on U.S. highways. However, unfazed by this news, company managers devised an ingenious plan to turn a looming crisis........

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