HONING THEIR CRAFT, POLICE WANT TO GET PEOPLE DRUNK

Cops Learn Roadside Tests for Alcohol And Drug Use by Studying Live
Subjects

Cpl. Taft Green Jr., a white waiter's cloth tucked into the pants of his
Texas highway-patrol uniform, poured margaritas for a roomful of state
employees. Four fingerprint technicians settled into a game of spades that
grew rowdier with each round of drinks. Others munched on peanuts while
listening to the music of Texas blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan.

Soon, a dozen earnest state-trooper cadets gathered to scrutinize each of
Cpl. Green's guests, politely asking them to walk heel-to-toe for nine steps
and then stand on one leg for 30 seconds.

Sgt. Doug Paquette of the New York State Police had a similar mission when
he parked a Winnebago camper at a heavy-metal rock concert in Albany. He put
a sign in the window that said, "Volunteers wanted for drug research." He
recalls telling the handful of curious fans who knocked on the door that he
was looking for subjects to help police spot signs of illicit drug use. One
reveler told him, " 'I'm not screwed up now, but I'll be back in a couple
hours,' " says Sgt. Paquette. And some of them came back.

In the search for strategies to deal with the stubborn and deadly problem of
driving under the influence, many cops are turning to an unusual tactic:
Recruiting volunteer drinkers and drug users to teach officers to recognize
impaired drivers. The tactic is drawing criticism from skeptics who think it
isn't effective or ethical. But advocates say there is no substitute for
working directly with people who are drunk or stoned and that the training
helps bolster courtroom testimony by officers.

Texas and a majority of other states hold "wet workshops," in which
bar-tending cops get volunteer subjects drunk. Police in Minneapolis say
they drive around looking for people on the street who appear to be on
drugs. Officers stop the wobbly pedestrians, promising they won't be
arrested. If the subjects agree, the police take them back to the precinct
house, where other officers are waiting to inspect them.

The most common technique, used in Phoenix, Houston and other cities, is to
intercept nonviolent arrestees on their way into jail. Police offer food and
an hour-long diversion from the holding tank, in exchange for their
services.

As part of a nationwide movement against drunk driving that blossomed in the
early 1980s, authorities in most states began broad use of roadside tests
for alcohol. It is more difficult to diagnose drug use quickly, and it
requires more training to learn the craft. As a result, police say they are
only now catching up on that front -- and are eager to find human guinea
pigs.

Tom Page, a former policeman in Los Angeles and Detroit who now advises
departments around the country on drug recognition, argues that some of
these techniques are ineffective and ethically questionable. "Volunteers"
invited to be drug subjects may feel they have no choice but to cooperate,
he says. The police, for their part, may be enlisting the help of people
they should be arresting. Looking for subjects at the county jail fails for
pedagogical reasons, Mr. Page asserts, because it is so likely that everyone
will be drunk or on drugs. He recommends to his clients that police learn to
do evaluations in real-life settings, out on the road.

Safeguards, Guidelines

Authorities say they follow safeguards to protect volunteers and stay within
the law. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has issued
guidelines for serving alcohol: Officers shouldn't carry firearms during wet
workshops and should screen volunteers to make sure they don't have a
history of alcoholism. "Volunteers should be released only into the custody
of responsible, sober persons," the guidelines say.

Police can't administer illegal drugs, however, and there aren't broadly
used guidelines for recruiting drug users. That leaves police largely to
their own devices.

Sgt. Paquette in New York has been scouring rock concerts for 14 years. The
state police aren't condoning drug use in order to train troopers to detect
it, he says. "These kids are getting stoned whether we are there or not." At
least one other state, Massachusetts, says it recruits at rock concerts.

Sgt. Paquette recalls one time in the summer last year, when officers walked
through the crowd outside of a concert near Buffalo, seeking volunteers.
"Some [music fans] were impaired at the time we talked to them. Others said,
'We'll see if we can help you out,' " and later stopped by a sheriff's
substation to do so, he recalls.

California and some other states prohibit being stoned in public. But New
York doesn't, as long as drug users aren't endangering themselves or
another, such as by getting behind the wheel of a car. Possessing drugs,
however, is illegal almost everywhere. Sgt. Paquette says he often offers
concertgoers a friendly warning: "If you come with drugs in your possession,
you're ours."

Officers who pull over a driver they suspect is drunk typically administer a
three-part initial test: walking a straight line, standing on one leg and
touching hand to nose. If a driver fails, that provides legally required
"probable cause" for police to ask to administer a breath test. Widely
available breath-test devices can reliably determine legal intoxication,
which in most states starts at 0.08 grams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of
blood. Breath-test results generally are accepted as powerful evidence in
court, accompanied by testimony from arresting officers.

The analogous roadside drug test includes the walking, balancing and
nose-touching steps, plus many more. The additional elements include a range
of medical questions and scrutiny of eye-pupil size and movement. Controlled
substances ranging from depressants, such as barbiturates, to stimulants,
such as cocaine, can have very different effects. There is no device for
roadside drug detection comparable to breath testers.

Urine and blood tests reliably detect the presence of drugs. But police have
to have probable cause to ask a driver to take a urine test and getting the
result can take a week or more. To prosecute someone for driving under the
influence of drugs, the authorities generally have to show not only the
presence of the drugs but actual impairment. That requires an arresting
officer to testify about the defendant's behavior and reactions.

That testimony can be greatly strengthened if the cop is a state-certified
drug-recognition expert, or DRE, and has administered the 12-step test that
most states now embrace. DREs were first certified in 1989. Today, there are
a total of about 5,400 in 36 states. Certification typically requires 72
hours of classwork and 12 accurate evaluations of actual drug users.

The human costs of driving under the influence are great. An estimated
17,448 people were killed in alcohol-related car accidents in 2001,
according to the most recent figures available from the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration. The number of accidents involving alcohol has
dropped sharply since the early 1980s, but the annual figure appears to have
bottomed in 1999 and has crept back up a bit since.

The government doesn't gather comparable figures for drug-related auto
fatalities, but drugs and driving are a problem. Based on a 2001 national
survey, the Health and Human Services Department estimated that eight
million people had driven under the influence of an illicit drug in the
previous year, compared with 25.1 million persons who drove under the
influence of alcohol.

Drinking Under Scrutiny

Police agencies across the country say they are eager to improve officers'
ability to turn up both drug and alcohol use by drivers. The Texas
Department of Public Safety in June offered its back-office employees a paid
day off to drink under scrutiny. Police also invited law-enforcement
students from a local community college. People with certain medical
conditions exacerbated by alcohol, as well as those younger than 21 and
older than 65, were excluded. The allure of state-provided booze wasn't
enough to fill the 35 slots, however. Only 21 people showed up for a 10:30
a.m. session.

By mid-afternoon, secretary Lorna Meyer was visibly tipsy. As Cadet Dennis
Redden administered the sobriety test, she told him he would "be one hell of
a trooper out in a little town no one has ever heard of." She promised to
attend his graduation. An hour later, she was in a deep slumber on the
floor. (Mr. Redden graduated, without Ms. Meyer in attendance, and is
assigned to a barracks in Canton, Texas, population 3,466.)

The father of drug-impaired-driver testing is Dick Studdard, a now-retired
Los Angeles Police Department motorcycle cop who began adapting the
technique from roadside alcohol-testing in the late 1970s. In 1985,
researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore checked his methods by
having 80 volunteers take marijuana, valium, amphetamines or a placebo. Mr.
Studdard and three fellow officers pinpointed the correct drug more than 90%
of the time.

Interest in the Studdard approach grew slowly, with Arizona law-enforcement
agencies embracing it the most enthusiastically. Police from a dozen states,
including Iowa, Rhode Island and Kentucky, have traveled to the Maricopa
County jail in Phoenix to complete their 12 required evaluations for DRE
certification.

Sheriff's Department Officer Paul White supervises the training at the jail,
the nation's fifth-largest municipal lockup. Mr. White, 35, brings a
personal zeal to his job: When he was a high-school senior, he was pulled
over in Columbia, Mo., for driving with a missing tail light. The state
trooper didn't notice he had been smoking marijuana. "I remember thinking,
'Wow, you have no clue how stoned I am.' " Mr. White says. "What if I had
gone down the road and killed somebody?"

On a torrid Friday evening in August, dressed in a black T-shirt with
"Sheriff" in yellow letters, he was scanning the crowd of incoming
arrestees. "Welcome to jail. The wet bar is closed, but the sauna is open,"
he said jovially.

Mr. White avoided subjects who appeared surly or completely zonked out.
Instead, he focused on one in a green shirt arrested for attempting to run
out of a department store with a stack of blue jeans. Mr. White shined a
penlight into his eyes for a few seconds, then asked the man to close his
eyes and estimate when 30 seconds were up -- a standard part of the 12-part
test. Twelve seconds later, the arrestee's eyes popped open, a possible sign
of a stimulant such as cocaine. Mr. White looked at his watch, shook his
head and both men laughed. In short order, the arrestee admitted smoking
crack two hours earlier.

After a quick explanation of the test and a promise of anonymity, Mr. White
assigned the man -- nicknamed "Polo" because of the insignia on his shirt --
to Arizona State Police Officer Kristi Shelley. She was unaware Polo, 32,
had just confessed his drug use to Mr. White.

First, Polo, was brought his reward: grape juice and a couple of plastic
bags filled with white bread, turkey slices, brownies and plums. Inmates who
are brought in after 6 p.m. generally don't get fed until breakfast, and
Polo had arrived shortly after the cutoff.

Ms. Shelley then took his pulse and checked his pupils. She jotted down that
his movement when walking was "robotic," a possible sign that he's on a
stimulant. He was free of needle marks but had blisters in his mouth, which
could have been from smoking a hot crack pipe.

After interviewing her subject -- today was the first time he tried to
steal, Polo says -- Ms. Shelley checked her notes one last time. Her
conclusion: cocaine.

"It's that obvious, huh?" Polo replied.