• +
• -
• Text size

Follow the mail on Twitter.

Topic tags

Crime, Cyprus, drink driving, motoring, police

Related content

ON ANY given weekend the police arrest 150 drunk drivers and with the year coming to an end, over 7,000 drivers have been charged with drunk driving, head of traffic police Demetris Demetriou said yesterday. 

Demetriou was talking on occasion of the annual road safety conference. 

“If we had more staff out on the streets we could arrest many more, even 1,000,” Demetriou said adding that number of drunk drivers is “extremely high”. 

“After 2am on weekends, anyone we stop is drunk,” Demetriou told the Mail. 

Driving under the influence has been persistently blamed as the primary reason for traffic deaths since 2007, Demetriou said.

From the 7,058 drunk drivers the police caught so far this year, 87 per cent were men and about a third were under 25 years of age, Demetriou said, adding that they’ve upped checks over the weekends. 

One shocking example Demetriou gave was that of a driver who would possibly have died in hospital if he hadn’t died on the street. 

Demetriou said that he had drunk a third more of what scientifically qualified him as being on the brink of death: ethanol levels in his blood were 643mg/dl when 450mg/dl are enough to kill a person, he said. 

Descriptions of what happens at that level of intoxication nearly always include circulatory and breathing failure. 

“Thankfully this driver was alone in his vehicle and did not collide with another,” Demetriou said. 

On average, Demetriou said that most dead drivers in 2011 had an ethanol blood concentration of 220 mg/dl. 

At that level, those driving will have slurred speech, double and blurred vision and might have blackout. 

The symptoms are worse if alcohol use is combined with drug use, illegal or otherwise.  

Police found that three of the dead this year had combined drugs and alcohol. 

From 2006 about 30 drivers died under the influence of drugs, 12 of those were under 25 years of age, Demetriou said. 

Presenting the results of a five year EU project DRUID (driving under the influence of drugs, alcohol), Demetriou said that alcohol followed by drugs are the main causes of road deaths. 

Cyprus did not participate in the project which included 50,000 drivers from 17 EU countries and Norway but Demetriou told the Mail that the size of the study justified data extrapolation. 

An interesting data point which arose from DRUID was that middle-aged women tend to drive while under the influence of prescription drugs. 

Cyprus currently has no provisions for on the spot drugs tests for drivers. “There is an urgent need to pass the bill on narcotests,” Demetriou, said adding that measures to rehabilitate drug and alcohol users needed to also be in place. 

Yesterday’s conference was a high-profile event attended by MPs and ministers including Communications and Works Minister, Efthymios Flourentzos, Education Minister Giorgos Demosthenous and Justice Minister, Loucas Louca. 

Acting government spokesperson Christos Christofides read a speech on behalf of President Demetris Christofias. 

Everyone agreed on the common goals of reducing road deaths and increasing road safety, while Flourentzos said that from now on they would refer to traffic accidents as traffic collisions because they are not accidents proper: “they are products of human negligence or irresponsible behaviour,” he said. 

He said that despite the significant reduction fatalities in Cyprus in recent year, the island was still far from the levels seen in other leading European countries. In Sweden for instance, he said the ratio of fatalities was 25 in a million compared to Cyprus where the ratio is 75 in a million.