The Agitator has a short post about a recent article about drunk driving deaths. He didn't mention the part of the article that I liked.

"The number of people who died on the nation's roads actually fell last year," U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said at a news conference in this Washington suburb. "However the trend did not extend to alcohol-related crashes."

The key phrase is alcohol-related. It's one of those meaningless phrases we tend to use to drive government policy

The overall number of deaths involving drivers and motorcycle operators with any amount of alcohol in their blood was 17,602 last year. That was up from 17,590 in 2005, according to spokeswoman Heather Ann Hopkins.

Any amount of alchohol.

It could be that the reason the number of alcohol releated deaths climbed slightly is that there's an increase in the number of jurisidictions that actually report every single fatality where someone had "any amount of alcohol". Maybe the testing equipment has gotten more sensitive to "any amount of alchohol".