Time to get tougher on our deadbeat drugged drivers
A NZ Transport Agency research paper said 47 per cent of people, who aren't "habitual" substance users, drug drive.
The Christchurch mind-set is one of life’s great paradoxes. Our city is universally feted for its friendly, community-minded ethos; a city with a strong social conscience where people readily muck in to help each other out; a city of fair play. Never before was that demonstrated so widely and relentlessly than during our sequence of devastating earthquakes.
But confounding our warm-hearted civic temperament is a strong streak of narcissistic territorialism when we get behind the wheel. Even when you’ve been away for a few weeks, you soon know you’re back in Christchurch, because of the feckless and feral drivers.
It’s like a calling card to herald your homecoming. How can it be that such a courteous city can be so discourteous on the road?
Whether it’s the swathe of drivers who blithely sail through red lights with addictive disregard, the mindless drivers who infuriatingly enter an intersection only to block it, the drivers who couldn’t give a damn about turning into their nearest lane, or the hordes of drivers hopelessly hooked to their handheld smartphones, you know you’re in Christchurch. (Our driver offending rate for illegal mobile phone use has been the worst in the country for six years straight.)
It makes you wonder how many of these reprobate road warriors are actually off their scone. How many are drugaddled? After years of kicking the can down the road, the government is gearing up to finally consider rolling out comprehensive random roadside drug testing.
The Automobile Association (AA) has been beating this drum for years, emboldened by the overwhelming support of its membership for a proper drug detection regime.
For every 3 million drink-drive tests carried out on our roads, fewer than 400 drug-impairment tests are performed. Currently, if police suspect a motorist is drug-impaired, they can ask the individual to complete behavioural tests such as walking heel to toe in a straight line, turning and standing on one leg.
It is very quaint, very 1950s. If they flunk that test, the driver must complete a blood test.
Since 2009, police only test for drugs if they have ‘‘good cause to suspect’’ a driver is impaired, whereby they look stoned or have been driving erratically. The AA’s Mike Noon says the police don’t bother with drug-impairment if they’ve already failed a breath-alcohol test, so the overwhelming number of drugged drivers aren’t collared.
Troublingly, the incidence of drugdriving is monumental. An Environmental Science and Research study in 2010 found illicit drugs in the systems of 35 per cent of 1046 drivers who died in crashes between 2004 and 2009.
Seventy-five per cent of drivers killed in crashes while under the influence of cannabis, caused the crash. Recently, a NZ Transport Agency research paper said 47 per cent of people, who aren’t ‘‘habitual’’ substance users, drug drive.
All ‘‘habitual’’ users, surveyed from Christchurch prisons, admitted drug driving. And most of these munters drove daily, with passengers.
New Zealand is light years behind the hard-nosed enforcement regimes now in force across Australia and Britain. The state of Victoria has been at the cutting edge of rapid-response roadside saliva drug-testing, consequently cutting the road toll.
Detection now takes under three minutes, springing cannabis, meth and ecstasy.
Pleasingly, Labour’s Transport spokesman Stuart Nash is backing a tougher regime for drivers getting stoned, ‘‘to put the fear of God into them.’’
The AA’s Mike Noon also wants a ‘‘cocktail offence’’ introduced, whereby drug and alcohol impairment triggers double penalties. New Zealand has badly dragged the chain on this insidious scourge. Technology has improved substantially.
Let’s get deadbeat drugged drivers off the roads by granting police the power to administer saliva testing for drugs whenever they pull someone over.