Stoned cold sober — or not
● South African road authorities do not have any plans to weed out stoned drivers.
Despite more South Africans openly smoking dagga, the government has not been actively enforcing section 65 of the National Road Traffic Act, which prohibits driving under the influence of a narcotic.
The Road Traffic Management Corp’s only response is that it is “far too early” to determine if last September’s Constitutional Court ruling that decriminalised the private use of cannabis has led to an increase in doped drivers.
“The Constitutional Court judgment ordered its decision on the use, possession, purchase or cultivation of cannabis for private use be suspended for 24 months to give parliament an opportunity to correct the constitutional defects in the act. In short, it is far too early in the history of legalisation to make a determination about whether the court decision will increase the number of impaired drivers,” spokesperson Simon Zwane said.
In Canada and Australia, where cannabis has also been legalised, traffic officers follow new protocols that include blood or saliva tests and field sobriety tests. This is because stoned drivers find it difficult to pay attention on the road, have reduced hand-eye coordination, and are often sleepy.
Rhys Evans of drug-test kit supplier AlcoSafe told the Sunday Times that his industry had not yet been contacted to assist with setting a testing standard that police can use on the roadside.
Evans said police in SA did not have any tools to prove that a driver was under the influence of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive compound in cannabis that gives the high. Nor did they have a definition, description or guideline as to what level of THC in the blood would constitute being under the influence.
“The only method currently is visual observation. The person would have to be so noticeably intoxicated that the police officer could take the person for blood tests and use that result as well as his visual observations and report as evidence for prosecution.”
Dr Lochan Naidoo, former president of the UN’s International Narcotics Control Board, said epidemiological studies showed that a stoned driver was twice as likely as a sober driver to have a car crash.
“Cannabis use leads to cognitive impairment, impaired critical tracking and laneweaving. Impairment in divided-attention tasks, reaction times and lane variability further increases crash risk.”
University of KwaZulu-Natal senior law lecturer Suhayfa Bhamjee said the Constitutional Court’s ruling was not a “free for all” and the rules and penalties regarding drink driving and driving under the influence of dagga should be the same.
“However, the rules regarding driving under the influence of alcohol are more precise, particularly in that a definite threshold has been established which puts consumers either above or below the threshold. As yet, no such threshold has been determined or regulated in terms of cannabis. If you’ve used cannabis, don’t drive until you are no longer intoxicated. Aside from a criminal conviction, it just is safer for everyone.”