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This Italian Governor Just Made It Practically Legal to Drive While Wasted

In the Italian province of Avellino, governor Caro Sessa thinks that you should now only get a slap-on-the-wrist fine for hitting the road after drinking a whole bottle of wine.
Photo via Flickr user Ken Lund

There are a lot of things, legislation-wise, that we don't all agree on from country to country. In the US, you have to be 21 to order a beer, but 14-year-olds are free to guzzle cava with their parents at restaurants in Spain. Or, for instance, there's France's pending ban of unlimited soda refills, which we hold so dear on American turf.

But one thing that's pretty universally mandated in the Western world is that there should be fairly tight regulations on drinking and driving. In some parts of Europe—including Hungary and Slovakia—you can't have a single drop of detectable alcohol in your system if you're behind the wheel, while most others permit only 0.02 to 0.05 percent blood alcohol levels, well below the US's 0.08 percent.

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But one Italian governor in Avellino, a province in Italy's southern Campania region near Naples, has tired of these killjoy restrictions—in spite of the fact that Italy's drunk-driving (and gondolier-steering) situation is already pretty dismal.

Caro Sessa, the province's prefect, has issued a decree stating that rather than having their licenses suspended for six to 12 months, Italians in the area who consume up to eight glasses of wine and are caught driving will now simply face a fine (about €800). Yep, that's like chugging a whole bottle to your dome before taking to the winding roads of the Italian countryside.

According to the UK's Telegraph, officials are so perplexed and pissed off by Sessa's move that they're accusing him of "suffering from heatstroke" when he made the decision. Other campaigners are calling the amended law a "crippling blow" to public safety.

On July 20, Sessa notified Avellino's five police squads that the "recent regulations" should immediately go into effect, citing the tendencies of the region's courts to cancel the suspension of licenses when appealed anyway—namely due to claims of faulty breathalyzers. Ostensibly, this creates a waste of time and money for the local administration as so many boozers slip through loopholes and cracks in the system and ride off on their merry way.

Hey, if you can't beat the drunk drivers, why not join them?

But Giuseppa Cassaniti, the president of the Italian Association for the Families and Victims of Road Deaths, is less enthused, telling the Telegraph that "This sends that message that it is OK to flout the law, that it is OK to drive drunk." A fine is a lot less intimidating than jail time, impoundment, or license suspension.

"It seems to me the prefect has done this because he's sick and tired of judges reversing the law in the appeal courts," she argued. Which might not be, you know, a great reason to make Italy's roads a drunk-driving free-for-all.

Previous legislation required a license suspension of up to a year and even the possibility of six months in jail for blood-alcohol levels of between 0.8 and 1.5 grams of alcohol per liter of blood. Under general Italian law, fines for this degree of intoxication while driving can also reach up to €3,200. Though the suspensions were not always enforced, many officials in opposition to Sessa's decree say that the laws carried cultural value that could at least put a little fear into the hearts of those considering a joyride after a heavy pour of pinot grigio.

In 2012, more than 3,750 people were killed in road accidents nationwide, according to an International Transport Forum report. The Italian National Institute of Statistics found that nearly 187,000 were injured that year in auto accidents as well. So it's not exactly like Italian citizens have proven that they don't need no stinkin' drunk-driving laws anymore.

As for how Sessa's laws will impact the roads of Avellino, we'll just have to wait and see. Preferably not from behind our dashboards.