Time to get real on drug drive toll
IT’S a shame that our senior police are often at their most candid in the twilight hours of their career.
Maybe it’s a fear of getting in trouble from their police superiors or their political masters in Spring Street that keeps them discrete and diplomatic while in the job, only to start preaching the truth as they are about to leave it.
We saw this with this newspaper’s exclusive reports last year on outgoing Geelong police chief Daryl Clifton, who upon leaving the force after 42 years, revealed that crime in Geelong — particularly youth crime — was not the pretty picture being painted by the head-in-the-sand positivity lobby.
There have been some good wins since but at the time he said crime in Geelong was the worst he had ever seen it.
And there is certainly a strong element of end-of-career candour with outgoing Geelong Highway Patrol boss Senior Sergeant Shane Coles warning of the dangers of a soft touch approach to drug drivers.
We see this menace anecdotally — our police and court reports routinely detail crashes and road fatalities involving ice users.
But the veteran highway patrol boss’s account that one in six drivers tested for drugs in our region come up positive, and his lucid descriptions of where the system is failing confirm some of our worst fears.
Ice drivers aren’t just a danger behind the wheel of a small hatchback. In some terrible local examples they have been driving trucks. The threat such things pose to the broader community is frightening.
It makes discussions about whether the drink drive blood alcohol limit should be reduced from .05 to .02 or .00 seem worthy but severely beside the point.
We need law and courts that clamp down on the worst menaces and not merely treat this as a health and social welfare issue. If we don’t, innocent law-abiding drivers will continue to be killed on the roads.