Drugged driving law ‘costly’ to enforce
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.
“Were 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 that 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 drugimpaired 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.
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.
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 for MADD Canada.