Let’s add another dimension to the definition of impairment. Is someone who texts while driving also arguably impaired? Sleepy? Non-drug related chemical imbalance?
Absolutely, all forms of impaired driving should be taken far more seriously than they are. The fact is that most times someone drives drunk or texts while driving, or any of the thousand other ways people drive unsafely, nobody gets hurt. So people become complacent and keep doing it. "Yes I was drunk (or texting, or whatever) but I didn't hurt anybody" is about as valid an excuse as "Yes, I was shooting into houses but I didn't hit anybody." The vast majority of impaired driving doesn't get stopped. Maybe the cops stop one impaired driver out of a hundred or a thousand. Limiting action to only those where there's been a collision is part of the recipe that gives us 35,000 traffic deaths a year in the U.S. alone.
Sometimes I say "drunk driving" as a convenient catch-all phrase for impaired driving, but I think that all forms of impaired driving should be treated severely.
So you’ve confirmed without a doubt that the OP has been convicted?
This is why I was careful to say that I am not speaking of the OP because we don't know if the OP was guilty or not. But this thread long ago moved on from advice for the OP and into a discussion of drunk/impaired driving generally.
As for confiscation of property, that should happen only after a conviction. The state should not be able to confiscate a car or other property (other than illegal substances) on merely an accusation.
Whether a leased car should be confiscated is a more difficult question. A stolen car would be returned to the rightful owner. Maybe that's the closest analogy. I don't know.