should drinking while driving be legal?

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keep in mind this does not imply nor necessitate an amendment to existing laws preventing driving above a certain level BAC (usually .08).

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But, the type of person who drinks a beer while driving is an alcoholic who drives drunk and would be above .08 if you pulled them over some other time.

If this person is an alcoholic, .08 isn't necessarily a good indicator that they are too inhibited to drive in the first place.

I don't see your point.  If you have a great tolerance and could drive safely at .08, you're still breaking the law at .08.

yessir, he's arguing at minimum that hard BAC reading should not be the lone barometer in handing out charges for drunk driving.

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That's ridiculous.  If you have .08 BAC, you are impaired as a driver.  At below .08 BAC, you're impaired.  Some people are more or less impaired, sure, but you have to draw the line somewhere. 

a chronic alcoholic -- ie, someone who drinks himself to .2-.4 BAC regularly for decades on end, is certainly not impaired at .08, and in fact is probably better suited to drive at .08 than he would be at 0 and in the throes of withdrawal, shakes, delirium tremens, etc.

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that all depends where your sympathies lie my man.  the DUI industry has given rise to a few destructive and distinct effects: erosion of the 4th amendment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Dept._of_State_Police_v._Sitz , Thurgood coming down on the correct side of a 4th amendment issue, as usual), cultural deification of law enforcement, and the treatment-industrial complex slush fund.  naturally I hate all of these things more than I hate people who drive while drinking or drunk.

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And as Lewis pointed out even though a lot of the mandated alcohol treatment classes for first time offenders might be unnecessary, it does help create jobs and get funding for something that is needed in plenty of cases,

there's somewhere between little and no evidence that the sort of 'treatment' that gets handed out to DUI (or low-level drug) offenders is effective, even when the offender actually meets the diagnostic criteria for substance abuse/addiction, which oftentimes is not the case.

Lewis hasn't posted in this thread, so you're presumably referring to a post he made about coerced treatment a few months back:

Coerced therapy is useless to its nominal aims and not really any sort of therapy at all, but it feeds a lot of people (and feeds them well) out of the public purse without officially swelling the ranks of government employees. Besides, it's cheaper than jailing middle class offenders and preserves their respectability. From the point of view of bourgeois democracy, it's a win-win-win-win.

so he actively disagrees with your first point, that certain people coerced into treatment a) need it and b) are helped by it.  the rest of the post I interpret to be an ironical/cynical commentary.  the inclusion of the statement "from the POV of bourgeois democracy" implies that the author is not coming from the POV of bourgeois democracy, allowing some space between the author and the analysis.  we refer to that space between author and narrator as irony.

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so you basically favor people digging holes and filling them back in.

and "people who do need it" presumes the product being sold here actually works, which it doesn't.

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That's ridiculous.  If you have .08 BAC, you are impaired as a driver.  At below .08 BAC, you're impaired.  Some people are more or less impaired, sure, but you have to draw the line somewhere. 

a chronic alcoholic -- ie, someone who drinks himself to .2-.4 BAC regularly for decades on end, is certainly not impaired at .08, and in fact is probably better suited to drive at .08 than he would be at 0 and in the throes of withdrawal, shakes, delirium tremens, etc.

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that all depends where your sympathies lie my man.  the DUI industry has given rise to a few destructive and distinct effects: erosion of the 4th amendment (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_Dept._of_State_Police_v._Sitz , Thurgood coming down on the correct side of a 4th amendment issue, as usual), cultural deification of law enforcement, and the treatment-industrial complex slush fund.  naturally I hate all of these things more than I hate people who drive while drinking or drunk.

If your sympathies lie with the perpetrators of automobile violence rather than its victims, may I kindly suggest you rethink your life.

straw man -- same logic could be applied to an opponent of the PATRIOT Act, accusing him of sympathizing with Islamic terrorists over 9/11 victims.