DRUGGED DRIVING

Testing Needs to Be Greatly Accelerated

Drugged driving or driving while impaired because of the use of drugs
- - prescription or otherwise - is becoming a major problem.

A case in Ohio has attracted attention. Ohio Highway Patrol Trooper
Leonard Gray had stopped to direct traffic around a jackknifed truck
in December 2002 when a car, traveling about 50 mph, hit him. Gray,
53, was flipped into the air, his head crashed into the car's
windshield and he landed, unconscious with his legs broken and head
bloodied, on the pavement.

The driver who hit Gray, 61-year-old Ronald Hamrick, had been
convicted of drug possession previously and had cocaine in his system
when he was tested seven hours after the accident, Hocking County
assistant prosecutor David Sams says.

If Hamrick had been drinking alcohol and had registered a
blood-alcohol level of 0.08 percent, the case against him would have
been open and shut, Sams says: aggravated vehicular assault, with
drunken driving as a factor in the charge.

However, Ohio, like most states, has no legal standard for determining
what level of drugs in a person's system makes him too impaired to
drive. The lack of such a guideline often makes it difficult for
prosecutors to prove cases of "drugged driving."

While it is a felony under Ohio law to possess, much less use,
cocaine, Sams says, thousands of dollars were spent on experts to
extrapolate back to the accident to prove the driver had enough
cocaine in his system that he shouldn't be driving.

Currently in Tennessee, law enforcement agencies use field sobriety
tests to determine whether to charge a driver with being under the
influence of alcohol or a drug. However, this cannot be easily
administered in all cases, especially if the driver was injured in an
accident.

Drivers apparently guilty and charged with driving under the influence
are taken to a lab and two vials of blood are taken and analyzed.
However, it takes about four weeks to get the results of the test and
if further testing is needed, as would be the case for other drugs, it
could take as long as six months.

There is opposition to zero tolerance as proposed by many. The 11
states with zero-tolerance laws are Arizona, Georgia, Indiana,
Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Utah,
and Wisconsin.

Six devices are now available and are being tested and five other
devices for measuring drugs in drivers recently became available for
testing. Most of them are simple such as a taking a saliva sample on a
swab and inserting it into a machine or placing a device resembling a
thermometer under the suspect's tongue.

Whatever the answer, we think it is urgently important to have action
in this area. The increasing use of meth as reported in Tennessee
greatly adds to the problem.