SMOKE AND MIRRORS

A Pot Breathalyser Can't Replace Old-Fashioned Police Instinct

Canada's police will have to get along without Robert Borkenstein, the
Indiana State police captain and professor of forensic studies who invented
the breathalyser in 1954.

He's not around to lend his talents for invention to the difficulty of
deciding whether a driver who's been smoking pot is impaired.

This should be the next step in the machinery of police work, but law
enforcement shouldn't wait around for a machine to make the job easier.

Borkenstein's invention made a decision of a driver's blood-alcohol limit
more accurate and legally acceptable. Being able to determine the quantity
of blood-alcohol concentration took the guesswork from drunk-driving
charges. Courts could rely on a machine to tell them when a driver was over
the legal limit, rather than human judgment.

Naturally, this does not take into account the fact some people are drunker
sooner than others, and the converse.

But it made police work easier.

Not surprisingly, in the wake of proposed changes to Canada's drug laws,
among the first to speak up were police officers. Among other objections,
they worry there is no machine to detect driver drug use.

What are they doing now? Do they expect Canadians to believe there are no
stoned drivers presenting a danger to themselves and others? And nowhere
are beleaguered police officers taking them off the road?

Police departments across the country should be setting their minds to
remembering what was done before the breathalyser came into regular use. An
officer used his or her own judgment, a series of observations, and an
ability to decide whether a driver was drunk. It wasn't perfect, but it was
effective. Yes, some drivers got off. Some still do. That didn't stop the
police from doing their job.

Just once, it would be heartening to hear those charged with enforcing the
law actually welcome the challenge of keeping up with Parliament, society
and with decisions made by the courts.

Police work wasn't meant to be easy. And the proposed decriminalization
bill just made the job more difficult. When any amount of an illegal drug
was intolerable, no decision had to be made whether the driver was still
capable. It was automatically a criminal offence to possess any amount of
drugs. Zero tolerance.

Yet, the attitudes that support and encourage zero-tolerance policies --
which remove the element of human decision-making -- now have Canada's
police forces complaining about toking and driving.

Call it laziness or easiness. Both apply. Zero tolerance means less work
and less effort (and thus less training and intelligence needed) on the
part of enforcement officials. So, too, does the existence of machinery
that eliminates human judgment.

Whether the use of marijuana is ever completely decriminalized or
legalized, the die has been cast. The recreational use of pot is now little
different than the recreational use of alcohol. Drinkers who learned not to
drink to excess and drive, will now have to be educated to the dangers of
smoking pot and driving.

The question is not frivolous. What do the police do now when they stop a
car and it's obvious something is wrong with the driver? Police shows have
educated the public to the give-away signs of drug use -- glassy eyes and
dilated pupils -- in the same way that slurred speech and wandering over
the centre line while speeding could well indicate a drunken driver.

Modern forensics, using the timeline identified in the Principles and
Practice of Criminalistics, by Keith Inman and Norah Rudin, are less than
100 years old. Even though a Scottish doctor, Henry Faulds, proposed in
1880 that fingerprints at the scene of a crime could identify the
criminals, his theory wasn't in systematic use until 1903. Alexandre
Lacassagne's 1899 discovery that bullets could be traced to a specific gun
barrel also took time to be accepted.

(The first recorded application of medical knowledge to crime-solving
occurred in 1248 when a Chinese book outlined how to distinguish drowning
from strangulation.)

Not until 1941 could individual voices be identified; in 1945, a test for
semen was introduced; in 1974, gunshot residue could be detected using an
electron microscope and only in 1986 was DNA first used to identify the
murderer of two young girls in England.

Science eventually makes police work more accurate. Occasionally, it makes
it easier.

Meanwhile, if the police can force a suspected drunken driver to give
blood, they can equally require a urine test for the present of THC, the
active ingredient of marijuana.

In truth, the decriminalization of marijuana is likely to have little
effect on real life. Those who smoke, will. The real decision to be made by
the courts is how much is too much to drive?

What is the THC equivalent of 0.8?