In 41 states, if you drink, drive and fail the breath test, your license is suspended on the spot.

And that, a national study released yesterday said, is the way to cut drunken-driving deaths: quick punishment, it said, brings a significant, measurable reduction in the death rate.

In Rhode Island, one of the nine states without such a law, it can take weeks or months to suspend the license of a drunken driver.

Yesterday, spokesmen for the state Department of Transportation and Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch said they will look into filing similar legislation for the next session of the General Assembly.

“We’re looking forward to seeing what’s in the study, because it sounds promising,” said Michael Healey, Lynch’s spokesman. DOT spokeswoman Dana Nolfe said, “The DOT will look into it and work with the governor’s office to see if it makes sense for Rhode Island.”

However, Steven Brown, the executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, questioned the legitimacy of punishment before conviction.

“This is taking away a license without an opportunity for a hearing, which is a basic principle of due process,” he said.

The study’s authors are Alexander C. Wagenaar and Mildred M. Maldonado-Molina, epidemiologists at the University of Florida’s medical school. It appears in the August issue of the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.

The study used 10 to 20 years of federal data on fatal alcohol-related accidents to compare the effects of pre-conviction and post-conviction license suspension in each of the states that changed their policies between 1976 and 2002. The authors said they identified the drunken-driving laws in the 50 states as of Jan. 1, 1976, and then tracked all changes through 2002.

The authors extracted nighttime accidents involving only one vehicle and no pedestrians or bicycles for each month for each state. Then they looked at the effect of changes in the laws.

The study found that the pre-conviction suspension laws reduced alcohol-related fatal accidents by 5 percent, which they estimate would have saved at least 800 lives per year in the United States.

The study’s central point is that immediate punishment is essential to effectiveness.

“Penalties delayed, even if relatively severe, do not have clearly demonstrable effects on behavior,” the authors wrote. “But penalties applied immediately, even if more modest, have clear deterrence effects.”

The results the study said, “confirm with larger samples and longer follow-ups what has been found in previous studies: laws requiring pre-conviction license suspension for driving while exceeding a specified blood or breath alcohol limit are effective in reducing alcohol related fatal crash involvement.”

Debates on drunken-driving policy are often complicated by disagreements about who the target is — so-called “social drinkers,” or hard-drinking alcoholics.

Wagenaar said he was able to sort out drivers by blood alcohol content figures included in the federal crash data, identifying three groups: those who had very little alcohol in their blood, between .01 and .08 percent; those legally under the influence, between .08 and .15 percent, and those with .15 percent or more, the seriously drunk.

Quick license suspension lowered the fatality rate in the three groups, Wagenaar said in a telephone interview, demonstrating that the law’s deterrent effect covers the entire population, from those who drink a little to those who drink a great deal.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration supports laws requiring “prompt, mandatory revocation or suspension of driver’s licenses” where the driver fails a test for alcohol or other drugs or refuses to take the test.

Drunken driving has been debated regularly in the Rhode Island General Assembly, with anti-drunken-driving activists making slow progress toward stricter laws.

But Healey, the attorney general’s spokesman, said Rhode Island has no provision for suspending a drunken-driver’s license before trial in District Court, and that it often takes six weeks or more to get the suspension. It can take months if the case is contested, he said.

He said cases in which the driver has refused to submit to a test for alcohol, such as the breath test, which are heard in the state Traffic Tribunal, move faster. But he said it can still take weeks to suspend a license for that offense.

blandis@projo.com