DRUG DRIVING

Use Invasive Law Judiciously

While there can be some debate as to whether drunk drivers are worse
than stoned ones, there can be little debate it would be best if
motorists never got behind the wheel after ingesting substances,
legal or otherwise, with the potential to affect their perception,
judgment, mood, dexterity or reaction times.

But police currently lack the appropriate tools to conclusively
determine whether drivers are impaired by drugs, particularly
marijuana. A new law empowering them to take blood, urine or saliva
samples from drivers they suspect of being high does little to solve
that problem while creating a whole set of new ones.

The correlation between blood alcohol levels and impairment is proven
and well-established, but the connection between drug concentrations
and impairment less so, depending, as it does, on the quantity,
quality and nature of the drug consumed. The law sets a benchmark of
80 mg of alcohol per 100 ml of blood, but lacks such a standard for drugs.

A breathalyzer, which is far less intrusive than seizing someone's
bodily fluids, is regarded as an accurate measure of a person's level
of impairment while driving. But there is no similar measure for drug
impairment. The fact drugs are detectable in someone's system doesn't
mean they were under the influence of those drugs while driving. It
doesn't even mean they ingested drugs on the day they drove.
Marijuana, for example, can be detected several weeks after consumption.

Canada's Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart, in a submission to
Parliament before the drug-driving law was passed, raised concerns
about the "proportionality" of seizing bodily fluids given the
quality of the information provided.

"Forcing people to provide bodily fluids is intrusive; the intrusion
is compounded when the samples cannot, with confidence, be used to
measure impairment," she said. "Collecting and testing bodily fluids
may simply result in the collection of potentially stigmatizing
personal information without furthering the goal of detecting drug
impaired driving."

Civil rights advocates and defence lawyers are already predicting
this new law will be challenged on a variety of fronts. Supporters of
individual privacy rights can only hope the courts deem the law
overly intrusive and of questionable value.

Police and prosecutors should use these new powers judiciously given
their invasive nature and take great care to ensure that any fluid
samples taken are used solely to assess impairment and not to create
a database of drug users. Samples must be tightly controlled and
destroyed upon the conclusion of the impaired driving matter.

Parliament is set to review this invasive law in five years and
should scrap it unless its value has been conclusively proven.