Celebrities, either through talent or opportunity or luck, or a mixture of all three, live charmed lives doing what they love and getting paid huge sums of money for it.
Dira Paes, drink driver
Society fawns over them and many people, especially the young, look up to them as idols.
Brazilian soap opera actress Dira Paes (right) is one of them. Romario is another. Mano Menezes, the manager of Brazil, is another. Actress Carolina Ferraz is another. Singer Djavan is another. Former Flamengo and Inter Milan player Adriano is another. And there are plenty more.
What do they all have in common apart from the fact they are very rich and hugely admired? They all refused to take breathalyser tests when stopped by police.
Paes was the latest and like most of these jokers she swore she wasn’t drunk. She complained that Brazil has a zero tolerance for people who drink and drive.
More than 40,000 people died in traffic accidents in Brazil last year. Between 40 percent and 75 percent of those deaths are alcohol related.
Are those statistics not clear enough?
Is it too much to ask that cosseted celebrities like Paes and Menezes and Adriano set an example?
2 comments
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August 9, 2012 at 11:53 am
Leonardo Carvalho
Worldwide issue:
Every day, almost 30 people in the United States die in motor vehicle crashes that involve an alcohol-impaired driver. This amounts to one death every 48 minutes. The annual cost of alcohol-related crashes totals more than $51 billion.
How big is the problem?
In 2009, 10,839 people were killed in alcohol-impaired driving crashes, accounting for nearly one-third (32%) of all traffic-related deaths in the United States.
Of the 1,314 traffic deaths among children ages 0 to 14 years in 2009, 181 (14%) involved an alcohol-impaired driver.
Of the 181 child passengers ages 14 and younger who died in alcohol-impaired driving crashes in 2009, about half (92) were riding in the vehicle with the with the alcohol-impaired driver.
In 2009, over 1.4 million drivers were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or narcotics.3 That’s less than one percent of the 147 million self-reported episodes of alcohol-impaired driving among U.S. adults each year.
Drugs other than alcohol (e.g., marijuana and cocaine) are involved in about 18% of motor vehicle driver deaths. These other drugs are often used in combination with alcohol.
from cdc.gov
another good source is: http://www.madd.org/statistics/
August 9, 2012 at 12:03 pm
andrewdownie
Worldwide issue, sure. But I write about Brazil and Brazil doesn’t seem to take the issue seriously.
Brazil’s Supreme Court ruled that drivers don’t have to take a breathalyzer test because it is offering evidence against yourself. And yet police can do a powder test on someone who fired a gun. What’s the difference?
Celebs have more money than most of us can ever dream of having. Certainly more than enough to pay for a taxi or a driver.