GENTRY — Police in Gentry took a proactive approach to impaired driving on Sept. 7 when officers visited Gentry High School and set up a course for students to drive wearing goggles which simulate impairment caused by drug and alcohol use. And though the goggles impaired vision, the students found the educational exercise to be an eye opener.
Students were given opportunity to drive the police department's golf cart through the course without the goggles and then to try it again with the goggles which caused blurred vision and made it extremely difficult for students to drive through the course without running over cones.
While some students were driving with the goggles, created and distributed by Fatal Vision, others were attempting to complete the steps of a field sobriety test without and then with the goggles, and many staggered and swayed without a drop to drink.
No arrests were made at the educational exercise, but students were given the opportunity to experience without drugs and alcohol a little of what it would be like to try to drive safely or pass a field sobriety test if intoxicated. And perhaps the biggest differences between the simulated experience and the real were the end results -- no one was hurt or killed and no lives were devastated or destroyed.
Police hope the simulated experience while students were sober will prevent the real experience and all the bad results which could follow.
Fatal Vision is a company which makes and sells goggles to simulate levels of intoxication with alcohol and with drugs. Students used a number of different sets of goggles on Sept. 7 to simulate different levels and types of intoxication.
General News on 09/14/2016