Intervention Aroostook: 8.17.2021

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine (WAGM) -A national organization is amped up to educate the community about the impact of impaired driving. Shawn Cunningham reports in this week’s Intervention Aroostook.

The scene of a car accident. An injured victim lucky to be alive, especially when more times than not...victims don’t come out of these incidents alive...and especially when drugs or alcohol is involved.

Nicole Hutchinson Maine M.A.D.D. Coordinator

“drunk driving is still the number one death on our roads ..every two minutes someone is injured by a drunk driver and every 51 minutes someone is killed.”

Shawn Cunningham NO STANDUP

Hutchinson knows that heartbreak personally after losing her sister Darcie in a drunk driver vehicle related crash in 1996. That lifechanging event thwarted her into new momentum to educate the public about the dangers of impaired driving through MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She’s active in that effort in Maine and New England and now serves on the organization’s board...a wider net, wider opportunities and wider responsibilities to broaden this important issue. The first being that impaired isn’t limited to just alcohol....

“there could be drugs involved and a lot of things involved with that are prescription drugs marijuana especially now its legalized in Maine this is not condemning and condoning drinking and driving you just don’t do it and same thing if you’re using some sort of drug over the counter drugs prescription drugs marijuana if you feel different you drive different.”

And one component that hits home that hardest are victim impact stories...something they’ve not integrated online...

“After you’ve been convicted of a DUI a judge may sentence you to go to one of these panels where you hear someone like myself who has been through the trauma of losing someone to drinking and driving and you have to sit through that and listen you have to hear my story...”

Hear her story and hopefully understand the dangerous consequences that can result from impaired driving...so that hopefully another precious life like her sister Darcie’s won’t be taken away....For more information on MADD go to their website at madd.org. Shawn Cunningham, NS 8.

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