Pubdate: Mon, 30 Jun 2014
Source: Regina Leader-Post (CN SN)
Copyright: 2014 The Leader-Post Ltd.
Contact: http://www.leaderpost.com/opinion/letters/letters-to-the-editor.html
Website: http://www.leaderpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/361
Author: Douglas Quan
Page: A9
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?224 (Cannabis and Driving)

DRUG-IMPAIRED DRIVING LAW 'CUMBERSOME'

Six years after federal law changes gave police new powers to compel 
suspected drug-impaired drivers to take roadside sobriety tests, 
watchdogs say the system has been ineffective, resulting in few charges.

But there is no consensus as to what should be done about it.

A B.C. technology company is producing what it says will be the first 
commercial marijuana-detecting breathalyzer, but a prototype is still 
a few months away from release and needs further testing.

The advocacy group MADD Canada recently went to Parliament Hill to 
push the idea of random roadside saliva testing - a system already in 
use in Australia and Europe but is likely to draw concerns about 
civil liberties here.

And unlike the 0.08 per cent blood alcohol concentration threshold, 
there's no scientific consensus about how much consumption of certain 
drugs will cause impairment, further complicating matters.

"We're moving forward. We're not quite there yet," said Doug 
Beirness, an impaired-driving research consultant in Ontario.

The current challenges aren't a complete surprise, Beirness said. 
Just look at the introduction in 1969 of the national breathalyzer 
law to combat drunk drivers. It was fraught with growing pains and 
lawyers are still arguing the reliability of the devices today.

"Any piece of technology will be challenged. And it will be 
challenged almost continuously."

Under 2008 Criminal Code amendments, an officer who suspects a driver 
may be impaired by drugs can demand the driver take part in a 
physical co-ordination test, known as a Standardized Field Sobriety Test.

If the driver fails that test, the officer can compel the driver to 
go to the police station for a lengthier evaluation by a certified 
drug-recognition expert.

If, at the end of that evaluation, the expert believes the driver is 
impaired by a particular drug, the expert can order the driver to 
submit a blood, urine or saliva sample to confirm the presence of that drug.

"Unfortunately, the new drug-impaired driving law has proven to be 
very costly, time-consuming, and cumbersome to enforce and 
prosecute," says an article published this month in the journal 
Traffic Injury Prevention and written by Western University law 
professors Robert Solomon and Erika Chamberlain.

The article said only 1,126 drug-impaired driving charges were laid 
in Canada in 2012, which is less than two per cent of the total 
impaired driving charges that year.

Further, the article said, "Canadian courts remain skeptical about 
the link between the presence of drugs in a driver's system and the 
actual impairment of his or her driving ability."

Enter the Cannabix Breathalyzer, a hand-held device for detecting 
marijuana being developed by B.C. technology company West Point 
Resources, which went public last Thursday.

Company officials say their device will be able to tell within 
minutes whether a person has consumed marijuana within the past two 
or three hours and can help bolster the observations of officers in the field.

"The likelihood of conviction goes up a lot more," said company 
president Kal Malhi, a retired B.C. RCMP officer who spent four years 
working in the drug section.

Plus, he said blowing into a device is not as invasive a test as 
saliva or urine samples.

But the device is only in the prototype stage and needs to go undergo 
scientific review. Some observers are skeptical.

"With all work that was done in Western Europe and Australia, if 
there was a reliable breath test for cannabis, I would've thought it 
would've (already) been pursued in the EU," said Solomon, who is also 
legal adviser to MADD Canada.

Convinced the current system for detecting drugged drivers is "not 
working," the advocacy group is appealing to federal lawmakers to 
adopt a system similar to what's been in place for years in Australia 
and parts of Europe - the random roadside screening of drivers for 
certain illicit drugs using saliva swabs.

"If the evidence out there is overwhelming and good we should adopt 
it, rather than reinvent the wheel," Solomon said.

Such a tactic is an effective deterrent, Solomon added, because it 
sends a message you can be "tested anytime, anywhere."

But random testing will surely run into civil liberties challenges, 
experts say. Canada has never allowed random alcohol breathalyzer testing.

"If you can't test randomly for alcohol, there's no way on earth you 
going to test randomly for drugs," Beirness said.

The debate doesn't end with what detection tools or methods work 
best. There's also no consensus over how much of a certain drug one 
has to consume before they become impaired.

Some have said five nanograms per millilitre of blood should be the 
limit for cannabis, while others have said it should be 10.

"The jury is still out," Beirness said.

At least a dozen U.S. states have opted for a strict zero tolerance 
policy where the detection of any amount of drug in one's system 
could lead to criminal sanction.

But critics have said such an approach could lead to a perception the 
policy is less about traffic safety and more about going after drug users.

The Canadian Society of Forensic Science's drugs and driving 
committee has received funding from the RCMP and the Ontario 
transportation ministry to assess the reliability of saliva-based 
roadside drug testing and investigate the establishment of limits for drugs.

Until they come out with their findings, young people will continue 
to believe that it's better to smoke a couple joints and drive than 
have a couple beers because they're less likely to get caught, Solomon said.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom