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One of my former bosses ( I retired, not him) insists that any consumption of alcohol means that anything that happens after that is soley the result of the consumption and that he designed the computer programme designed to collect the crash data so that any mention of alcohol would make it automatically the major cause. The scenario I gave was that a driver reaches to open a can of beer and crashes because he wasn't paying attention to the driving...his system said alcohol caused the crash. Make it a can of pop and it was drive without due care.
In any crash investigation it is very unlikely that one single factor caused the crash, usually it is a combination of several factors. In the media world to simplify and grab headlines, it is easier to use the one that will attract the desired attention. With the exception of slow speed parking lot crashes, the huge majority of crashes I investigated showed that, among all the contributing factors, speed in all it's various incarnations, was the major cause, not the only one but the major one. When I see a crash scene picture in the media and see vehicle parts looking like a plane crash scene I don't have to have anybody tell me that this is the result of a high speed crash. What I don't know is what caused that speed and that is what the actual investigators decide.
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