A column ordinarily runs in this space, but I have something important to say, and the editors have graciously permitted me to say it.

Last week I wrote a flippant, arrogant and offensive column. This was, of course, nothing unusual. However, last week’s column was different, in that that it urged students to do something which could easily cost them their lives: to drive drunk.

In this column, titled “Sometimes It’s Necessary,” I stated that I had drunken driven often. I added that drunken driving is sometimes unavoidable, even advisable. I went on to provide tips on how to drive drunk without getting caught.

I would pay $500 not to have written this column, because the truth of the matter is drunken driving is dangerous, foolish and downright evil.

When you drink and drive, you’re risking the lives of other people. It doesn’t matter how drunk you are. If you are even a little bit drunk, you have no business getting behind the wheel. A car is a deadly weapon, and if not handled with extreme care it can maim, paralyze or kill.

Driving drunk is not much different than getting drunk and then trying to shoot an apple off someone’s head. Even if you’re a crack shot, you’re still drunk and have no business doing anything so dangerous unless you are stone sober and in the fullest control of your faculties.

I am incredibly sorry I wrote this column. I joke about a lot of

things, but I now realize that drunken driving is not a subject to joke about. So please, I beg you, my fellow students, don’t drive drunk. It ruins people’s lives, yours and others, and if you think a DWI, or a fatal accident, can’t happen to you, you’re wrong.

My best friend in high school’s family was ruined by drunken driving. One day a drunken driver hit his father and broke his back. The father was rendered an invalid for the next ten years. He was unable to work, his family became poor and his children lost all respect for him. Eventually he took his own life. All this pain, all this suffering was due to the sorry excuse for a human being who couldn’t be bothered to spend $15 on a cab ride.

So I beg you, I beg you, fellow students, don’t drive drunk. If you get one thing from all the columns I have written, get that. Don’t drive drunk. You are risking your life and what is worse, the lives of innocent people, for the sake of a cab fare. It’s hard to imagine a dumber risk.

I stated in the column I have driven drunk many times. This used to be true. However, I have quit drinking, as my New Year’s resolution, because alcohol causes periodic catastrophes in my life. Though you need not go that far, I ask you, fellow student, to let your New Year’s resolution for 2006 be, “I will not drive drunk.” If you drink and drive in 2006 some innocent person might not see 2007, and you might not either.