Expert: Legalized marijuana may drive up road risks
In a state already known for a high rate of alcoholrelated driving fatalities, Connecticut officials are bracing for what the potential legalization of recreational marijuana will mean on the road.
The state Legislature’s Judiciary Committee this month advanced a bill to legalize the sale of recreational marijuana and approved $500,000 for each of the next two years for the state police to train more troopers as drug recognition experts.
The bill, which faces several hurdles before becoming law, would also allow the state Office of Policy and Management to reimburse local police departments to train their officers to be drug recognition experts.
Marc Pelka, undersecretary of criminal justice with the OPM, said he did not know how much the training will cost.
James Rovella, commissioner of the state Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection, said the training is vital in a state plagued with a high volume of impaired drivers.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Connecticut ranks behind only Washington, D.C., for the highest percentage of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities nationwide.
“There’s no place for having an altered state of mind while driving a motor vehicle,” said Kevin Nursick, spokesman for the state Department of Transportation. “We see it every single day, over and over and over again.”
In addition to alcoholimpaired drivers, the amount of Connecticut’s drugged drivers is about 20 percent higher than the national average, according to a 2017 report released by the Governor’s Highway Safety Association.
Amy Parmenter, manager of public and government affairs for the AAA Allied Group, presented the GHSA report to legislators during a hearing last month on the proposed drug recognition experts funding bill.
The GHSA report concluded that 44 percent of drivers who were killed in crashes nationwide and tested for drugs in 2015 had narcotics in their system, Parmenter said.
According to AAA’s analysis of the data, 63 percent of drivers killed in Connecticut accidents and tested for drugs that year tested positive.
The same test data revealed the most prevalent drug was marijuana, Parmenter said. She said the presence of the drug did not conclusively indicate impairment or the cause of the crash.
A recent study conducted by the national Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the Highway Loss Data Institute found accident claims rose 6 percent in states that legalized marijuana for recreational use, including Colorado and Washington, compared to surrounding states where it was illegal.
Since 2011, Connecticut’s Highway Safety Office within Nursick’s agency has provided federal funding for 53 local and state police officers to be trained as drug recognition experts.
The Highway Safety Office pays for travel expenses, equipment and materials associated with the training. Each of the individual departments is responsible for paying other officers to fill in for those involved in the drug recognition expert training. The average cost of travel associated with the training is $2,000 per officer, DOT officials said.
The designation, which is certified by the International Association of Police Chiefs, allows the trained officers to determine if a driver is impaired by a variety of substances from heroin and crack cocaine to over-the-counter medications and marijuana.
The training includes classes in drug impairment detection and other instructional hours, said State Police Trooper First Class Donald Comstock, one of seven drug recognition expert instructors in Connecticut. Candidates are required to pass a test at every step of the process before they can proceed to the final exercise — practical experience in detecting what types of substances are causing impairment.
The fieldwork usually requires trainees to go to Arizona, where prison officials allow police in the drug recognition expert instruction process to access people recently arrested who are impaired by some type of substance.
The drug recognition expert trainees must accurately determine what’s causing the impairment of 12 people.
Some drugs dilate a person’s pupils, others affect blood pressure or body temperature. Each drug has its own set of detection signals that officers learn to recognize.
A person can be impaired from marijuana more than 24 hours after smoking or ingesting it, Comstock said.