Quote:
an issue of cultural change

How do these open container laws work, anyway? Is having an open container of alcohol in the car actually an offence, even if there are other adults in the car, or does it just provide reasonable fourth-amendment grounds for stopping the car and testing the driver for intoxication?

If the former, I'd certainly not vote for it. This sounds like another one of Bitt's laws that attempt to reinforce already-illegal acts by making illegal acts that might lead to them that also make illegal the same acts that wouldn't lead to illegality, and the same "Bitt's Razor" applies: if the driver's intoxicated, prosecute him or her for intoxication; if the driver's not intoxicated (even if others in the car are), in what sense is he or she a criminal?

Or is the issue deciding whether a driver is intoxicated or not? In the UK at least, gadgets like the OP's, except properly calibrated and maintained, are widely used by the police force to measure intoxication, and their accuracy is widely trusted both by the drinking public and by the courts. I'm pretty sure there's no "open container" law in the UK, though in fairness I don't know what would happen if you were stopped while alone in the car and there was some beer knocking about.

I guess it's only the availability of simple tests for drunken driving that have caused it to be so intensively prosecuted. By any standards sleep deprivation causes more accidents and deaths -- a night's missed sleep worsens your driving to the level of an 0.08 BAC drinker -- but it's much harder to test for, not least because being stopped by the police usually causes enough of an adrenaline release to temporarily wake you up.

Peter