Perhaps our legislators should hear the loud voice of the pope and enact pertinent laws against drinking and driving.
It is a known fact that driving while intoxicated or drunk is dangerous. Drivers with high blood alcohol content (BAC) endanger not only themselves but other people on the road.
While laws against driving under the influence or drunk driving was already implemented by other countries like England since 1897, the Philippines, where numerous cases of road accidents involving intoxicated or drunk drivers, has yet to enact its version of the universally implemented law.
Most of our neighboring countries and territories have strictly enforced laws against people who drive while under the influence of alcohol.
In China, for instance, drivers should not exceed 0.02 percent BAC when they drive or they will be fined, imprisoned, and their license revoked.
The allowable BAC for drivers in the following countries are: Japan 0.03 percent; Republic of Korea 0.05 percent; Taiwan 0.05 percent; India 0.03 percent; Cambodia 0.05 percent; Malaysia 0.05 percent; Singapore: 0.08 percent; and Thailand 0.05 percent.
In the Philippines, like in Laos, there's no BAC limit for motor vehicle drivers.
So don't be surprised if you see drunk Korean drivers involved in road accidents on the evening news. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Koreans and other foreigners love to stay in our country. Here, they can drink as much as they want and drive without any fear.
A writer of an Asian news website stated the following in his article: "With Christmas around the next bend, the world's traffic police will be planning their holiday clampdowns, seeking strategies to curb the Christmas carnage (drunk driving). But not here in the Philippines. Because this is one of the last bastions of the freedom to drink and drive; a rare outpost where a man and his beer can happily take charge of a ton of high speed iron and steel with no fear of legal repercussions."
"Most sensible countries banned drink-driving decades ago, but the Philippines works at its own pace. So while a law has been suggested from time to time, nobody's quite got around to signing it off," the writer added.
I normally don't like reading or hearing something foreigners write or say about us. But the guy was simply correct. He was perfectly right in his observation. Filipino officials do not really care about the loss of lives and limbs brought about by drinking and driving.
They don't care about something that other countries have been caring about for more than a century now, and which was already adopted by other poor countries like Cambodia some years back.
So what do our honorable legislators and executive officials care about? Charter Change, impeachment, fertilizers, and other things, which have lesser importance than their constituents' lives and limbs.
Drinking and driving and its consequences are currently far greater nowadays that undisciplined drivers on board fast mini-motorcycles have taken over our national and local roads. But it seems this is something "invisible" to our honorable officials.
