DUI laws in Bowling Green are strict because many people continue to drive under the influence. Those charged with DUIs in Bowling Green this year have already outnumbered past years.

For 2005, so far, 496 DUI arrests have been made. At the same time last year almost one hundred less arrests were made. In 2003, 387 arrests. In 2002 there were almost half as many arrests as this year.

An estimated 30 percent of the arrests were University students for 2005.

Police can credit the rise in arrests to increased enforcement, recently lowered blood alcohol concentration legal level and the “Drink and Drive, You Lose” campaign set forth by the Ohio Department of Public Safety that educates the community on the effects of drinking and driving.

Eric Reynolds, Chief Deputy for Wood County Sheriff’s Office, said: ” Whenever you educate the public and follow it up with enforcement it makes the safety for everyone that much more successful.”

The legal drinking limit in Ohio is 0.08. The average BAC reading for 2004 was 0.16 to 0.07 over the legal limit. Almost 10 percent of those who took the BAC test blew a 0.20, over double the legal limit.

It is this 0.08 BAC limit that has senior Jason Nicholas unhappy with his pending DUI citation.

“If I have one beer I can get a DUI. It takes a lot more than one beer for me to have even close to impaired vision and judgment,” he said.

Also concerned with the low BAC level is Brittany Shepler, senior.

“A DUI should not be solely based on breathalyzer numbers,” she said. “If you pass all the field sobriety tests and you weren’t pulled over for reckless or suspicious driving then it should be a less severe charge for failing the breathalyzer.” However, Shepler is happy that drunken driving is being taken as a serious danger and would rather have police overreact than under react.

“I think it is good that they are cracking down because the poor judgment made by a drunken driver may take an innocent life,” she said.

In the past 10 years, 4,687 people were killed and another 219,040 were injured in alcohol-related crashes in Ohio reported the Ohio Department of Public Safety. Another half million drivers were convicted of driving under the influence in Ohio, 24,000 of these were repeat offenders.

The increasing numbers of people being charged with DUIs in Bowling Green is not likely to decrease according to Mary Cowell, clerk of court, who gathers the DUI statistics. She has seen a constant influx in convictions recently.

As long as the police continue to do their job, the number of DUI arrests will not go down unless people stop drinking and driving.

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