The holiday season is supposed to be a time to celebrate, yet for too many Americans, it’s a time to mourn the lives lost in the alcohol-related vehicle crashes that regularly spike each year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

Maine has taken commendable steps toward combating operating under the influence – but a jump in OUI deaths here between 2014 and 2015 shows that we have much more work to do.

Every 53 minutes in the U.S., someone dies from a car crash involving an alcohol-impaired driver. And as horrifying as that statistic is, it actually represents a vast improvement: The rate of alcohol-related traffic deaths has been cut in half since the early 1980s.

Driving after drinking has fallen out of favor as Americans have embraced measures aimed at better deterring, identifying and arresting impaired motorists.

Maine led the effort. We were the second state to implement a mandatory penalty for a first-time OUI conviction, the third to lower the blood alcohol limit to 0.08 percent and one of the first to urge harsher punishment for repeat offenders. And our proactive stance was noticed and recognized by the advocacy group Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which has consistently given Maine high marks in their annual rating of states’ drunken-driving laws.

But Maine saw a total of 52 OUI deaths last year, up 40 percent from 2014 – even as drunken-driving fatalities rose just 3.2 percent on average nationally, according to federal regulators. And in MADD’s latest ranking, the recently released 2016 Report to the Nation, Maine is only in the middle of the pack when it comes to prevention.

We have sobriety checkpoint and ignition interlock laws – “the two most effective ways to dramatically reduce fatalities and injuries,” according to MADD – but we need to use them more aggressively.

While researchers have found that sobriety checkpoints do the most good when they’re carried out regularly (Mothers Against Drunk Driving calls for monthly implementation), Maine doesn’t conduct them on a regular basis.

We also get points off for not allowing for the use of ignition interlock after arrest, though all convicted offenders are required to use the devices, which keep a vehicle from starting unless the driver submits to a breath test.

Maine was once way ahead of our peers on the path to preventing drunken driving. But it appears that we’re now headed the wrong way – and if we don’t make an immediate course correction, we could have a hard time finding our way back to road safety.

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