In order to understand how serious the problem of drinking and driving is in Florida, it helps to look at statistics regarding fatal alcohol-related crashes. Statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, include any accident where a driver had a blood alcohol level of 0.08 percent or more, which is the state’s legal limit, and resulted in a fatality. In 2015, there were 797 fatal accidents involving drunk drivers. The state had a total of almost 3,000 fatalities from all car accidents in the same year.

The state is fairly average when it comes to comparing the drunk driving issue in the state with the rest of the country. Nationally, there were 35,092 fatal car accidents in 2015 with 10,265 being alcohol related. When you compare those figures with the state’s figures, you will see that Florida’s drunk driving accidents made up 27 percent whereas the country was at 29 percent. Although this is average, it is not good news. The state could be doing better. In fact, the best state percentage in the country was only 16 percent in 2015.

Despite the efforts of law enforcement and the state to try to education drivers and prevent drunk driving, in a five-year span, comparing 2006 through 2015, the state has not really seen any major improvement in fatal drunk driving crashes. In addition, from 2014 to 2015, the number of fatalities increased by over 100 with fatality rates being over 700 for the first time in four years. There was a time between 2006 and 2013 when the numbers were steadily going down, but they started back up in 2014 and seem to be continuing to climb.