CONCERNS RENEWED OVER RISE IN DRUNKEN-DRIVING DEATHS.

Byline: Matthew L. Wald The New York Times

The people who lead the national campaign against drunken driving say that something frustrating and sad has happened to their 15-year campaign: It has gotten old. The crusade helped cut the number of alcohol-related deaths by 40 percent, but the sermon seems to be wearing off, and the number of deaths is rising again.

There were 17,274 deaths on the roads last year related to alcohol, up from 16,580 in 1994, the first increase in the 1990s and by far the steepest increase since drunken driving became a national issue in the early 1980s. There are other, less tangible signs, too.

``It's harder and harder for us to get major media coverage,'' said Katherine Prescott, national president of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She said grant money, once easy to get, has gone in the last few years to a succession of other worthy causes: rape victims, then child-abuse victims and, most recently, victims of domestic violence. Membership in her group is steady, she said, with each crash death bringing new recruits, but fund-raising is off.

More subtly, the subject has slipped off the center of the conversational map. ``The important thing is, are everyday people talking about it?'' said Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach, a professor of communications and sociology at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California. And right now, she continued, ``it's not really at the center of interpersonal discourse.''

Eternal vigilance, it seems, is the price of sobriety. And vigilance is not a strong point in the American character, or Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have made his observation about vigilance in the first place.

With drinking and driving, as with drugs and smoking, public health responds to a certain level of public hectoring and then tends to suffer relapses when it stops.

A long campaign, waged with news stories about individual tragedies, by broadcast and print public service ads, and even by writing designated drivers into the scripts of television shows, resulted not just in stricter laws and law enforcement but in changed public norms.

``I can remember when it was just fine to leave a party half-smashed; that's not the case now,'' said Ball-Rokeach. But even some of that has slipped away; Ball-Rokeach said she recently heard someone at a party, drink in hand, making a joke that probably wouldn't have been considered funny five years ago: the guest wanted to be a ``designated drinker.'' But in the current climate, the joke is acceptable, she said.

The cause-and-effect relationship here is murky. Are there more deaths, and more complacency, because the assignment editors and the people who choose public service ads now are less interested? Or is the loss of enthusiasm in the media a sign of society's having moved on, and thus an effect rather than a cause?

Dr. C. Everett Koop, who was President Reagan's surgeon general, said that the loss of public attention is the root of bad behavior, and that no one is focusing public attention now.

``If there is not an authoritative voice that continues to hammer away at a single problem, it tends to be missed,'' he said. Koop hammered away at tobacco, and the smoking rate was at 26 percent when he left office in 1989, he said, as against 30 percent now. In between were surgeons general who did not make a public assault on tobacco their cause, he said.

Dr. Jay A. Winsten, director of the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard School of Public Health, sees ``a direct relationship between media coverage and drunken-driving fatalities.

``There were two periods of unusually high media attention to drunk driving; the first was in 1983 and 1984, and it was largely the work of groups like MADD,'' he said. ``The second was in 1989, '90, '91 and '92, with a hefty representation of the designated driver.

``During each high-media period, alcohol-related traffic fatalities, correcting for vehicle miles driven, fell twice as rapidly as during the intervening low-media periods.''

The death rate per 100 million miles traveled - a standard measure of traffic - fell rapidly in the early 1980s, from 1.58 in 1982 to 1.28 in 1985. After a slight increase, the rate resumed a firm downward path after safety advocates popularized the designated driver, in 1988, from 1.17 that year to 0.70 in 1994. Last year, it rose to 0.72.

The rate continued to fall even after Congress allowed the speed limit to rise to 65 mph on rural interstates in 1987. The increase of all federal speed limits last year would not yet be reflected in the accident statistics, experts say.

A major engine of the public attention has been public service announcements. At the Advertising Council, which produces many of them, Ruth A. Wooden, the president, said that, in part, the campaign worked its way out of a job. ``It's not at the top of the agenda now,'' she said of drunken driving, ``but in a way, that's related to its success; it's a problem solved, in a way, and let's go on to something else.''