ONE MAN'S OPINION - ROADSIDE DRUG TESTS

Will we never learn? We relax our gambling laws and we have personal
bankruptcies, marriage breakdowns, and people in Thunder Bay losing their
houses, forced onto the streets. We have suicides; we create special
agencies to cope with all the grief and misery that we have created by
creating this evil regressive tax system on the dumb and the weak.

Now we are on the brink of relaxing our drug laws which will have equally
predictable results. So, in an effort to somewhat diminish the damage that
they're about to do to us, Ottawa is preparing to test the law as early as
next year to allow police officers to test motorists suspected of driving
while under the influence of drugs in many cases, no doubt, after they've
killed someone on the highway. The new law will permit police to take
saliva, blood, perspiration, and urine samples to determine whether s driver
has drugs in his or her system. Problem number one is it's unlikely that
anyone can come with a reliable roadside test to determine drug impairment.
As Russell Barth of Ottawa points out, different drugs, indeed different
batches of different drugs, stay in the body for different periods of time.
So, if traces are found, the impairment may have passed or impairment may
not have even occurred. "Apparent" impairment may be the result of fatigue,
cold medications, blood sugar imbalances, holding cell phones, coffee cups,
or hamburgers - defence lawyers would have a field day as the carnage on our
highways and in workplaces soared after the government with its relaxed drug
laws turns loose one more Frankenstein Monster.

This is Rick Smith and That's One Man's Opinion