Steve Lee is an accident and injury attorney based in Houston, Texas. For a little under four decades, Steve Lee has dedicated his career towards helping those who have been injured in accidents due to no fault of their own. The drunk driving statistics in Houston are higher than anywhere else in the country, and as a result the numbers of serious injuries and deaths in drunk driving accidents are disproportionately high. If you or a loved one has been injured by a drunken driver, contact the law offices of Houston accident attorney Steve Lee for a free legal consultation today.

Is It Any Wonder Texas Has Such A High Teen DWI Rate?

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Steve Lee is an accident and injury attorney based in Houston, Texas. For a little under four decades, Steve Lee has dedicated his career towards helping those who have been injured in accidents due to no fault of their own. The drunk driving statistics in Houston are higher than anywhere else in the country, and as a result the numbers of serious injuries and deaths in drunk driving accidents are disproportionately high. If you or a loved one has been injured by a drunken driver, contact the law offices of Houston accident attorney Steve Lee for a free legal consultation today.

In New Orleans, one of the most popular drinks on Bourbon Street is called “The Hand Grenade.” It tastes like a pleasant and mild blend of fruit juices and liqueurs. In fact you can barely taste the alcohol. But in fact a hand grenade is actually a very potent concoction of gin, grain alcohol, melon liqueur, rum and vodka. Just like it’s name would imply, the person who imbibes it doesn’t feel the effects until well after it is consumed.

There isn’t much danger for adults on Bourbon Street, in that everything is within walking distance, cabs are readily available, and identification is checked very strictly. So if a few hand grenades are imbibed by adults, then no real harm is done.

But what would you say if hand grenades were available in bottles in supermarkets? What would you say if they were sold in bright, shiny packaging featuring cartoonish mascots? What if “you can barely taste the alcohol” became one of the reasons underage drinkers were clandestinely purchasing them in droves?

Believe it or not, this scenario is happening all over the country, and it is most certainly happening in Texas. One of the more popular types of beverage among teen or otherwise underage drinkers are called “Alcopops.” Other names for them are “ready-to-drinks,” “flavored malt beverages,” or, somewhat charmingly, “malternatives.” Among the brand names are Smirnoff Ice, Skyy Blue, Jack Daniel’s Hard Cola, Bacardi Silver and Mike’s Hard Lemonade.

Most of these beverages actually start out as beer, but then they have the taste, color and most of the alcohol taken out. What is left over is then mixed with flavors, sweeteners and distilled alcohol. It is then placed in packages with bright colors and put in the stores.

One of the major natural deterrents for underage drinking is the strong taste of alcohol. Many of you probably remember shuddering with revulsion at your first taste of beer, much less your first taste of hard alcohol. With these alcopops, all of a sudden, kids that aren’t used to drinking can suddenly imbibe with impunity without worrying about how it tastes. After all, you can’t even taste the alcohol, and in fact some of these drinks taste just like lemonade or fruit punch. As you can imagine, these drinks have become extraordinarily popular with underage girls.

Not wanting to leave their marketing to attract just the girls, many beer and liquor manufacturers are now capitalizing on the current energy drink fascination that is occurring among teenage males. Teens are drinking tons of Red Bull, Rockstar and various other energy drinks with impunity.

So now we are seeing new products that are combining caffeine with alcohol. Drinks like Sparks look practically identical in packaging and size to various non-alcoholic energy drinks, and most of them are marketed on teen friendly web social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. In fact, many alcoholic energy drinks are actually cheaper than non-alcoholic energy drinks.

With this cynical sort of subtle marketing going on, it is no wonder that the drunk driving rate is Texas is so high, and it is sadly no wonder that Texas is ranked among the states with the highest level of underage drunk driving related deaths or injuries.

It is senseless and tragic anytime someone loses their life to a drunken driver, and that tragedy is compounded when someone involved is a mere teenager. Whether the teenager in question was the driver, the victim, or both at the same time, what makes drunken driving deaths so tragic is that any one of them could have been prevented.

Any parent knows that it is impossible to keep an eye on your kids twenty four hours a day. But teaching them the dangers of alcohol and making the right decisions when it comes to driving should be considered an incredibly important lesson. Unfortunately, with alcopops and alcoholic energy drinks, that lesson just got a lot harder to teach.

If you or a loved one has been injured due to the actions of a drunken driver, contact Houston attorney Steve Lee for a free legal consultation today.


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5823 Gulf Freeway
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Houston, TX 77023
Phone: 713-921-4171
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