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New Mexico Bars Add Talking Urine Cakes To Restrooms To Discourage Patrons From Driving Drunk

New Mexico, a state that has a notorious reputation for drunk driving, is now adding another arrow to their public health quiver–talking urine cakes.

According to a KOAT news report, New Mexico bars are indeed experimenting with talking urine cakes–and the state’s Transportation Department is footing the bill. According to the news release, 500 cakes have been purchased at approximately $21.00 a shot (no pun intended).

I must admit–at least from a public health perspective–this is one of the more unique approaches to addressing this menacing concern. Having been in the health field, I am relatively familiar with a number of other approaches like administrative license revocation, sobriety checkpoints, and vehicle confiscation. But talking urine cakes, this is new stuff.

Not wanting to be uninformed, I did a bit of searching to learn more.

First, I started with the familiar stand-bys. I am here to report that The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Journal of the American Medical Association are a little light in this area.

Same goes for the American Public Health Association. “How about the Society of Public Health Education,” you ask? Ditto.

You can almost feel the grant proposals beginning to churn.

Not to be shutout completely, I did locate a vendor of such a device on er, uh, Google–they’re known as Wizmark. I was unable to locate their symbol on the Big Board.

Believe it or not, their site was pretty informative and is definitely worth visiting.

I suggest you call it anthropological research–just be sure to clear your cache.

At the end of the day, you’ve got to hand it to New Mexico for taking a new approach to this stubborn public health problem. I would have suggested maybe examining the states that have the lowest incidence of drunk driving and then implementing similar strategies.

But that’s just me…old school I guess.

Yours in good health,

Dr. David Hunnicutt

Copyright 2006, David Hunnicutt.com

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