OBJECTIVE: to evaluate if the Dry Law (nº 11,705/2008) fulfilled the goal to after reduce the accidents caused for drunken conductors three years of its promulgation. MATERIAL AND METHOD: retrospective study of the patients with submitted craniofacial breakings to the surgery in a university hospital, two periods: before the law (2005 the 2007) and after the law (2008 the 2011). RESULTS: 265 patients (220 men and 45 women) in this period being, 149 (56%) before law and 116 had been operated (44%) after the law, indicating reduction in the number of traumas (p-0,04). It had predominance of the age group between 19 and 40 years, in both the periods. The main causes of the traumas had been the automobile accidents, the physical aggressions and the falls. Excessive alcoholic consumption was identified in 15,4% of patients before and 19% after the law. The jaw and the maxilozigomatic complex had been the attacked bones more. CONCLUSIONS: the reduction in the number of polytrauma operated in this institution after three years of the promulgation of the dry law was of 22%, percentage on this side of the waited one and longing for. It is necessary to collate these results with the ones of other services that carries through this exactly type of attendance to compile given and to extend the statisticians. The low index of reduction in the number of traumas and the story of excessive alcoholic consumption for some patients at the moment of the trauma, exactly after the law, signals for the necessity of adoption of more rigid measures of control and punishment to the infractors.