DGT and Spanish government plan to withdraw driving licences of alcoholics in Spain until they are rehabilitated

Spain's Directorate-General for Traffic (DGT), the Ministry of Health and the regions are working on a project to withdraw the driving licences of drivers who have alcohol abuse problems and are repeat offenders until they are rehabilitated.

"The driver's regulations already state that having abuse or dependence means having lost the psychophysical aptitudes required to drive," Álvaro Gómez, director of the National Road Safety Observatory of the DGT, explained to Europa Press.

In this sense, Gómez indicated that if in any driving licence renewal process an addiction to alcohol is detected, the licence should not be renewed. "The question is to introduce a public health component to the problem," he said, while saying that it is "important to punish", but at the same time to add a "rehabilitative" approach.

The idea is that in people who are detected by the health authority as having an addiction, a conditional withdrawal of the licence will be urged. In other words, if the driver subsequently undergoes a rehabilitation process and passes it, their licence will be given back to them.

"It is a medium and long-term project because it has to be done with the regions," said the director of the observatory. He also pointed out that the protocol of the driver recognition centres has specific sections to detect addictions, but that "few cases are still detected". He added that "this is a step further", after attending 'The fight against drink-driving and breathalysers with vehicle immobilisers in Spain' event organised by the Mapfre Foundation.

In his speech at the conference, the director argued that "alcohol addiction is a disease which, according to the European directive and the Spanish regulation, disqualifies people from driving". DGT sources told Europa Press that this is an initiative that "has been in the pipeline for many years, because it is a complicated issue".

Gómez also defended the need to lower the maximum alcohol limit for all drivers based on the "recommendations" made by the European Transport Safety Council in its report on alcohol in 2022, and on the fact that "the countries with the lowest death rates in the world", Norway and Sweden, have a limit of 0.2 grams per litre of blood (g/l).