THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Wednesday, January 8, 1997            TAG: 9701080381
SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A14  EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 
DATELINE: CHICAGO                           LENGTH:   44 lines

STUDY: MANY AMERICANS ARE DRIVING DRUNK TELEPHONE SURVEY INDICATES THAT NEARLY 1 IN 12 OF THOSE DRIVERS WAS UNDER 21.

Americans got behind the wheel after drinking too much an average of 14,000 times an hour in 1993, according to researchers who say they may still be underestimating the extent of drunken driving.

And nearly one of every 12 instances involved a driver under age 21 - too young to drink legally in any state, the researchers reported in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The findings come from a telephone survey of 102,000 adults age 18 and older, 2.5 percent of whom admitted they had driven ``after having had perhaps too much to drink.'' The number of occasions reported each month was multiplied by 12 to get an estimate of approximately 123 million for the year. That number was divided by 8,760 for the estimate of hourly instances.

The prevalence of alcohol-impaired driving was 82 times higher than the 1993 arrest rate for driving under the influence, according to FBI arrest data.

And it probably underestimates the true extent of alcohol-impaired driving, researchers said. Though respondents remained anonymous, the social stigma associated with driving drunk probably prompted them to underreport the number of episodes, researchers said.

Also, since the survey required subjective judgments about their own impairment, many respondents - especially heavy drinkers - may have denied that alcohol hurt their driving, researchers said.

And the study excluded teens under 18, among whom alcohol-impaired driving has been shown to be ``quite prevalent,'' the researchers said.

Still, 123 million episodes is a ``huge'' number, said Dr. Robert D. Brewer, a co-author of the report and a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

``There's always a danger that people are going to just sort of throw up their hands and think, `Well, what can we do about this? We've been working on this for a long time. Haven't we done anything?' '' Brewer said. ``In fact . .

Alcohol-related crash deaths have declined more than 30 percent since 1982, he added Monday. However, they still totaled some 17,000 in 1995.

KEYWORDS: DRUNKEN DRIVING STATISTICS