“Phallic” Interlocks Raise Eyebrows, Decrease DUIs

COLONIAS DE ALCOHOLICAS, NM – An incriminating mass of plastic tubes, wires, and buttons currently grace the steering columns of some 9,000 vehicles throughout New Mexico.

Ignition interlock breathalyzers, designed to prevent a clumsy drunk from starting a vehicle, have been used by courts statewide for the past several years with less-than-successful results.

The devices, operated by blowing into a tube to detect blood alcohol levels, have proven to be outsmarted by even the most incompetent of persons.

Carlos “Muchos” Cervezas of Drunk Rock Falls, NM, admits he sometimes enlists the assistance of his 8-year-old daughter to get his car started.

“Sometimes she ain’t around, living with her foster mom,” states Cervezas. “But when she visits me some weekends I see it as a green light to drive over to the Slik Pik to get another 12-pack. I bribe her with candy.”

The Las Cruces Skidmark spoke with a number of other “interlock inmates” who declined to give us their names, but also stated they have ways to beat the system.

“Doug”, working on his ninth DUI, was one of the first success stories under the Operation Blow & Go program

One man, an upbeat drywall installer going by the name “Doug” who’s been convicted 8 times for DUI, told us he’s tried everything in the book – from paying his neighbor’s son to blow into his unit and even eating a handful of peanuts to mask the alcohol in his breath.

“Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t,” said Doug.

When we asked drivers why they don’t just avoid driving while intoxicated by planning ahead or calling a sober friend, the responses were all similar: “Didn’t want to bother nobody”, “Drinking is part of my culture”, and “I didn’t think I was that drunk.”

One small community in northern New Mexico decided to try something different.

Colonias de Alcoholicos is a poor, sleepy community of around 5,000 people, yet over 75% of its registered and unregistered drivers have been arrested at least once for drunk driving – including a third of the police force and the mayor. City councilors realized they had an epidemic problem on their hands and the standard interlock devices issued by the State were just not working.

Area attorney Frito Pendejo, fed up with working on dead-end cases with the same dead-end results, participated in a town council meeting last summer and suggested an idea.

“It was more of a joke I made out of disgust and frustration,” said Pendejo. “I said something to the effect of ‘if people had to blow into a weird adult toy instead of a plain tube they might think twice about the whole deal’ and brought the meeting to an awkward silence.

Pendejo says a few people started giggling until a City Councilor interrupted and said “You know, that’s a good fucking idea. Let’s try it.”

Colonias de Alcoholicos partnered with a Las Cruces company, Interactive Body Parts LLC, which manufactures soft, lifelike human body parts for a variety of purposes.

“We get orders from schools, from hospitals, from the adult film industry – you name it,” said the company’s president, Tom Hung. “All of our products are made from high-quality, flexible silicon products and molded to the client’s exact specifications. We can also mix the color to match a specific race or skin tone, complete with wrinkles and other flaws, depending on the body part.”

To test out the effectiveness of the new program, an initial order of 500 units was placed. The units, designed to look like a human penis, are fused to fit snugly over the mouthpiece nozzle of existing interlock devices. Attempted removal of the extension unit will render the entire device inoperable and the vehicle will not start.

“We expected the first batch of offenders to balk at and even refuse the new unit extensions,” said a city spokesperson, “but we instituted a new mandate that would ultimately impound a violator’s vehicle if they did not comply with their probationary punishment.”

“Being caught and punished doing something as dangerous as drunk driving is not supposed to be fun or easy. Some states issue bright yellow license plates for hardcore offenders so everyone knows what they’ve done. The humility factor, you know? Seeing as we already have bright yellow license plates here in New Mexico, that would likely have no effect.”

Unit installations began last September and the results have been staggering. Within three months city officials formally named the program Operation Blow & Go, ordered 2,500 more units, and began searching for a freelance graphic designer from the Bay Area to put together a clever advertising campaign.

A standard ignition interlock system, as demonstrated by the mayor of Colonias de Alcoholicas in his own vehicle

A representation of the Operation Blow & Go interlock device (nobody would consent to having their picture taken while blowing into the unit)

“Doug”, who we spoke with before he became one of the first violators to participate in Operation Blow & Go, had this to say:

“I went in for my monthly probation checkup and they told me they had to upgrade my interlock thing. Then I go back out to my car and I see this pink thing on the steering column. I’m like ‘What the hell?’ and it looks like a you know what. All these cops are standing around my car and my P.O. tells me to ‘Just blow”. I was, like, ‘Hell no’, I ain’t queer or nothin’. And the cops are, like, just blow & go. Finally I just wanted to get outta there so I closed my eyes and blew hard, car started, and I took off. I swear those pigs were laughing at me. Totally embarrassing, man.”

Doug detailed the effects of having the unit in his car and told us it’s really changed his life around.

“I barely drive anywhere now. Not worth it. I really have to blow hard into that thing to make it work so I tried doing it while hiding down on the ground but it don’t activate unless you’re sitting upright in the driver’s seat with your head above the steering wheel. Screw that!”

Doug also shared that he hasn’t driven his vehicle while intoxicated once since the unit was installed. He says he’s abandoned his old tricks of bribing others to blow his interlock unit, stating he was “too much of a man” to let anyone see that “rubber thing” dangling from his dashboard.

Statistics show a nearly 90% decline in drunk driving arrests in just six months and people statewide are taking notice. Lightbulb of the project, attorney Frito Pendejo, told us news of Operation Blow & Go has spread around the state and appears to have induced some sort of perceived panic among citizens.

“We’ve been hearing stories of people who have only heard about what we’re doing up here with the drunks and they decide to just call a cab instead of risk becoming part of Operation Blow & Go. The jokes are flying around. You know, like, ‘Drive drunk, get dicked’. It certainly has a different connotation than the Governor’s current ‘Drive drunk, get nailed’ slogan – profane variations of which we see quite a bit of on tshirts and MySpace taglines in the college crowd. It seems like the public is taking it upon themselves to eliminate drunk driving completely, like nipping it in the bud, before the program has a reason to spread statewide.”

“We think it’s working,” said Pendejo, finally, with a dull smirk.