MANY, UNDETECTED, USE DRUGS AND THEN DRIVE, REPORT SAYS

An estimated nine million Americans a year drive while under the influence
of illegal drugs, but efforts to identify, arrest and treat them have been
hampered by the weakness of state laws and, until recently, a lack of quick
and reliable drug tests, a new report says.

The report, issued yesterday by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, calls on states to adopt
criminal laws setting strict standards on the presence of drugs in a
driver's body, just as they use blood alcohol content to determine that a
driver is intoxicated.

At present, eight states have laws, almost all passed in the last few
years, that make it illegal to drive with any measurable amount of
forbidden drugs in the system. In the other states, prosecutors must
usually prove that the reckless conduct for which a driver was stopped was
caused by drugs - a difficult standard, the report said, because a variety
of factors may come into play, including the type of drug, the dose, the
way it was taken and the user's metabolism.

"Driving under the influence of drugs is a growing national problem,
particularly among young people, but drugged drivers are not detected
nearly as often as drunk drivers," said Michael Walsh, the lead author.

"There is an assumption that if we can arrest drunk drivers, we are getting
all the drugged drivers, but that's not true," said Mr. Walsh, president of
the Walsh Group, a consulting firm in Bethesda, Md., who was executive
director of the President's Drug Advisory Council under the first President
Bush. "There are literally millions of Americans who are driving under the
influence of drugs that we are not detecting, arresting or sending to
treatment."

The report is the first comprehensive study of drugged driving and of the
patchwork of state laws to deal with it. The recommendation for new laws
was the work of 28 experts, including police officers, prosecutors, drug
specialists, insurance company executives and advocates from organizations
like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

One difficulty is a lack of national statistics about the problem, Mr.
Walsh and other experts said.

The nine-million-a-year estimate comes from a nationwide survey, done for
the Department of Health and Human Services in 1999, that asked respondents
whether in the last year, they had driven within two hours after using
marijuana or cocaine. (The new report does not cite a comparable statistic
for driving under the influence of alcohol.)

But Mr. Walsh said the 1999 estimate might be low. A Florida survey done by
his consulting firm in 2000 found that about a third of all people stopped
for driving erratically or speeding who then failed a field sobriety test
were not drunk on alcohol but high on drugs. The determination was made by
urine testing.

Even in the eight states that criminalize driving with any amount of
illegal drugs in the system, the number of prosecutions is small. In
Minnesota, for example, there were only 204 convictions in 1999. The other
states are Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Rhode Island and Utah.