ROADSIDE DRUG TESTS TOO SKETCHY

While the new Carbon Tax may have gotten a lot of attention in the
media, there was another change in regulations affecting driving made
on July 1 of this year -- police officers can now test drivers for
drug impairment in the same way that they test for alcohol thanks to
the implementation of Bill C-16.

Of course, the mechanisms for testing are different. There's no
breathalyser for drugs, so it must be done in other ways.

When an officer pulls a suspect over, he or she will have to prove to
the officer that they are fit to drive by performing sobriety tests.
And if an officer flunks you on your roadside sobriety test, that
means you get to pee in a cup down at the station.

This legislation relies on two assumptions that I feel are faulty;
first, it presumes that police officers are skilled enough at
performing roadside evaluations for drugs to detect intoxication in a
driver.

Secondly, we are assuming that a blood or urine test can accurately
determine that a driver is under the influence of a drug to a degree
that impairs driving at the time they are driving.

In regards to the first assumption, I doubt the average traffic cop
can reliably determine if someone is high on drugs from a few
multitasking tests.

A 2002 study in Forensic Science International showed that officers
performing these tests are wrong between 19 and 35 per cent of the
time. That could mean a third of all those who get pulled over will be
giving bodily fluid to the cops whether they were high or not.

And what about those fluid tests? How will they determine if you're
intoxicated enough? We currently don't have a definite intoxication
level for drugs like the 0.08 per cent limit we have for alcohol.

And perhaps best of all, that blood test can't even pinpoint when you
were intoxicated. Even if you smoked a joint at a party three weeks
ago, that blood test will still show you as positive for weed, and
that means you could be charged.

As Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart wrote, "Forcing people to
provide bodily fluids is intrusive; the intrusion is compounded when
the samples cannot, with confidence, be used to measure
impairment."

Perhaps before people begin to celebrate these new laws, we should ask
ourselves how dangerous is driving under the influence of drugs.

According to ICBC's own data, drivers under the influence of drugs or
suspected of being under the influence of drugs accounted for less
than one per cent of all collisions.

So why is it that small fraction of drivers are being pursued with
such fervour?

Driver inattention, such as talking on a cell phone, led to almost 37
per cent of collisions; if we're so committed to making the roads
safer, why is it still legal to talk on a cell phone while driving,
and why is it almost impossible to take careless drivers off the road?
It may be easier and politically more popular to target drugged
drivers, but they really account for nothing more than a drop in the
bucket.

Don't get me wrong, if you're stoned, tripping or flying so hard that
you can't walk a chalk line, you shouldn't be driving. But that said,
the way these new laws are set up, it's highly likely that we're going
to see a good number of innocent people convicted alongside those who
are truly making our roads less safe.

If we begin thinking that these new tests are so infallible as to lead
to convictions the way the breathalyser does, we're really ignoring
the vast margin of error they possess, and the potentially devastating
costs to those convicted erroneously. Here's hoping this law gets
taken off the books, and quick.

Liam Britten is a student from the Print Futures Program at Douglas
College doing an internship at The TIMES.