ROLL AND SMOKE

Conference Reveals Little Consensus On Drugging And Driving

How stoned do you have to be before you become dangerous behind the wheel?
That was one of the questions asked at the 16th International Conference on
Alcohol, Drug and Traffic Safety, held last week in Montreal. And while a
whole slew of representatives from the academic, scientific, political and
law enforcement worlds talked about the issue, there doesn't yet seem to be
a consensus on how to deal with it.

The police say they are most concerned with saving lives, period. Just how
much dope is in your system is, according to Surete du Quebec Sergeant
Pierre Angers, irrelevant.

"The level of drugs is a sterile debate and I do not want to get into it
because it will never end," he says. "Our objectives are to remove those
who are dangerous on the roads. The ones who may kill themselves and others."

But the levels of THC in one's system while driving do not necessarily
correlate into degrees of driver impairment. In fact, Catherine Tzambazis,
of Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, drew the opposite
conclusion.

"It appears driving is more impaired as the level of drugs decreases," she
says. Her thesis results show the effects were most visible 50 minutes
after smoking, when THC levels in the blood were lower, rather than
immediately after smoking, when the amount of the drug in the blood is
highest. "Regular users had much higher levels than non-regular users but
they performed much better," she adds.

By all accounts, driving under the influence of drugs is not as dangerous
as driving drunk. A study released at the conference by the Societe de l'
assurance automobile du Quebec (SAAQ) analyzing the role of alcohol and
other drugs in traffic crashes in Quebec shows that alcohol remains the
number one problematic drug for drivers. Apart from alcohol, the three
drugs more frequently detected from urine samples of fatally injured
drivers were cannabis, benzodiazepines (therapeutic drugs) and cocaine.
However, the report states that drug presence in urine does not necessarily
mean impairment.

The leader of the federal Marijuana Party, Marc-Boris St-Maurice, doesn't
advocate using drugs at the wheel but is quick to point out what was said
in the report. "My main concern exactly is that the level of drugs in the
system are detected a long time after the joint has been smoked," he says.
"If someone who is not used to smoking marijuana takes two puffs, that
person has a low THC level but is highly incapacitated. Whereas someone who
is used to smoking a lot, that person's THC level may be high but he is not
affected."

St-Maurice also says that setting limits for the amount of drugs found in
someone's system is a political, and contradictory, issue. "There is no
such thing as an 'okay' amount of illegal drugs. Rational drug testing is
impossible."

Even though there is an ongoing dispute about the relevance of the levels
of drugs in a driver's body, scientists continue to develop devices to
measure it. A California-based company called LifePoint has developed a
saliva-based drug and alcohol testing system called Impact. It tests for
marijuana, cocaine, PCP, amphetamines/methamphetamines, opiates and
alcohol, and can detect them within five minutes. They claim that the
results obtained from saliva testing are comparable to blood testing.