Coming when it did on the edge of summer, a season of heavy driving and too often, hard drinking, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision upholding the constitutionality of sobriety checkpoints was a timely boost to efforts by the law-enforcement community to get drunks off the road and reduce the carnage caused by drivers operating under the influence of liquor.

Public safety officials in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and many other states were waiting anxiously for the high court to rule on Michigan’s checkpoint program, which had been challenged as an invasion of personal privacy.

Although few people would argue that these roadblocks — sometimes referred to euphemistically as “safety” checkpoints — do not constitute at least a minor infringement on liberty, a 6-3 majority of the court, and polls indicate a majority of the public agree that society gains significantly in the exchange between rights and common safety.

“The balance of the state’s interest in preventing drunk driving,” wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist in the majority decision, “and the degree of intrusion upon the individual motorists who are briefly stopped weighs in favor of the state program.”

The decision reminds a society consumed by the hysteria over largely urban, drug-related, gang violence, that to innocent people, the number one enemy still is the drunk at the wheel of a car. Last year, drunken drivers wiped out 25,000 Americans — many times the lives taken by all the Uzis, sawed-off shotguns and the other illegal weapons in the arsenals of street criminals.

Roadblocks such as those conducted to date in Maine, work because the policies are spelled out clearly and the procedures are applied consistently and evenhandedly to all drivers. They are only one component of a larger program that involves tough, relatively swift sentences, constant publicity and the likelihood of apprehension — that’s where the roadblocks come in.

In Maine, drivers have options.

They can stay sober.

They can find a designated driver.

They can be alert to the announcements of law enforcement officials, who actually identify one week in advance the areas targeted for roadblocks, and then the confirmed drunken driver can stay home or take another route.

Unfortunately, the unlucky people who meet these drunks head-on, or who as pedestrians are run down by them, aren’t given any choices. They can only hope that before someone weaves across the center line or onto a shoulder or bike path that the roadblock, the last line of defense against the criminally irresponsible, has been working as it should.

…and repeaters

Sobriety checkpoints have been effective, both as a dragnet to catch drunkendrivers and as a deterrent. They have altered the social habits of many generally law-abiding people, whose only brush with the wrong side of the statutes might have been an occasional tipsy weekend drive from club or party to home.

The checkpoints have proved intimidating to social drinkers, to people capable of acting responsibly when warned about the likelihood of apprehension and the consequences of conviction, but it is increasingly evident that they will have little impact on the chronic highway drunk, who is numb to intimidation and seemingly incapable of acting responsibly.

Some people shouldn’t be on the road at all, but the judicial system continues to pass them through the process and back into society, where they have access to a steering wheel.

Chronic offenders are better off in state custody, undergoing treatment for alcohol or drug abuse, than in the hospital, recovering from an accident, or sharing a cemetery with someone they’ve killed.

The highly publicized string of deaths in the past few years caused by repeat OUI offenders resulted in tougher laws. These men finally were locked up, but only after killing other motorists or pedestrians. The reality is that Maine law, hard as as it has been on casual and social drinkers, continues to be just so much foam as it applies to hard-core drunks, recidivists and those impervious to intimidation by threats of fines, jail time and loss of community standing.

More needs to be done.