Center for Consumer Freedom

Now that you have lent your star power to Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) as members of its Board of Advisors, there's something you should know about this once admirable organization: MADD's agenda is to reduce alcohol consumption.

Not just among underage youth, but across the board. Not just to prevent drunk driving, but to make it more difficult for everyone to enjoy adult beverages. MADD has outgrown its original mission, becoming a 21st-century prohibitionist organization. For example:

• A MADD billboard compares beer to heroin by depicting a beer bottle as if it were a syringe.
  

• Another MADD billboard shows the following words around empty glasses of alcohol: assault, drowning, burns, rape, suicides.
  

• A MADD television ad argues that "if you think there's a difference" between heroin and alcohol, "you're dead wrong."
  

• In May 2003, a MADD official told the Los Angeles Times that his group opposes a bus service that helps prevent drunk driving by taking people to bars: "The fact that it's taking them to Santa Barbara to drink in the first place is problematic," he said.
  

• In Arlington, Texas, MADD opposed any beer drinking by golfers at a public course. "I've seen how alcohol can destroy lives," said a MADD spokeswoman. "Life is risky enough on its own."
  

• MADD supports higher taxes on adult beverages to reduce everyone's drinking.
  

• MADD has asked Congress to fund nationwide roadblocks to get people to "drink less."
  

• According to a MADD spokesman, the "most effective way" to deal with people who drink anything prior to driving is to "arrest them."

Drunk driving is a genuine problem, but as former MADD president Katherine Prescott says, it has generally been reduced to "a hard core of alcoholics who do not respond to public appeal." Unfortunately, MADD no longer focuses on those hard core alcoholics who drive drunk. If you want to do something about the real problem, involving yourself with MADD is not the way to do it.