Pubdate: Mon, 30 Jun 2014
Source: Calgary Herald (CN AB)
Copyright: 2014 Postmedia Network
Contact:  http://www.calgaryherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/66
Author: Douglas Quan
Page: A11

DRUGGED DRIVING LAW 'CUMBERSOME'

Enforcement, prosecution pose problems

Six years after federal law changes gave police new powers to compel
suspected drug-impaired drivers to take roadside sobriety tests,
watchdogs say the system has been ineffective, resulting in few charges.

But there is no consensus as to what should be done about it. A B.C.
technology company is producing what it says will be the first
commercial marijuana-detecting breathalyzer, but a prototype is still
a few months away from release and needs further testing.

The advocacy group MADD Canada recently went to Parliament Hill to
push the idea of random roadside saliva testing - a system already in
use in Australia and Europe but is likely to draw concerns about civil
liberties here.

And unlike the 0.08 per cent blood alcohol concentration threshold,
there's no scientific consensus about how much consumption of certain
drugs will cause impairment, further complicating matters.

"Were moving forward. We're not quite there yet," said Doug Beirness,
an impaired driving research consultant in Ontario.

The current challenges aren't a complete surprise, Beirness said. Just
look at the introduction in 1969 of the national breathalyzer law to
combat drunk drivers. It was fraught with growing pains, and lawyers
are still arguing the reliability of the devices today.

"Any piece of technology will be challenged. And it will be challenged
almost continuously."

Under 2008 Criminal Code amendments, an officer who suspects a driver
may be impaired by drugs can demand that the driver take part in a
physical co-ordination test, known as a Standardized Field Sobriety
Test.

If the driver fails that test, the officer can compel the driver to go
to the police station for a lengthier evaluation by a certified
drug-recognition expert.

If, at the end of that evaluation, the expert believes the driver is
impaired by a particular drug, the expert can order the driver to
submit a blood, urine or saliva sample to confirm the presence of that
drug.

"Unfortunately, the new drug-impaired driving law has proven to be
very costly, time consuming, and cumbersome to enforce and prosecute,"
says an article published this month in the journal Traffic Injury
Prevention and written by Western University law professors Robert
Solomon and Erika Chamberlain.

The article said only 1,126 drug-impaired driving charges were laid in
Canada in 2012, which is less than two per cent of the total impaired
driving charges that year.

Further, the article said, "Canadian courts remain skeptical about the
link between the presence of drugs in a driver's system and the actual
impairment of his or her driving ability."

Enter the Cannabix Breathalyzer, a hand-held device for detecting
marijuana being developed by B.C. technology company West Point
Resources, which went public last Thursday.

Company officials say their device will be able to tell within minutes
whether a person has consumed marijuana the past two or three hours
and can help bolster the observations of officers in the field.

"The likelihood of conviction goes up a lot more," said company
president Kal Malhi, a retired B.C. RCMP officer who spent four years
working in the drug section.

Plus, he said, blowing into a device is not as invasive of a test as
saliva or urine tests.

But the device is only in the prototype stage and needs to go undergo
scientific review. Some observers are skeptical.

"With all work that was done in Western Europe and Australia, if there
was a reliable breath test for cannabis, I would've thought it
would've (already) been pursued in the EU," said Solomon, who is also
legal adviser for MADD Canada.

Convinced that the current system for detecting drugged drivers is
"not working," the advocacy group is appealing to federal lawmakers to
adopt a system similar to what's been in place for years in Australia
and parts of Europe - the random roadside screening of drivers for
certain illicit drugs using saliva swabs.

"If the evidence out there is overwhelming and good we should adopt
it, rather than reinvent the wheel," Solomon said. Such a tactic is an
effective deterrent, Solomon added, because it sends a message that
you can be "tested anytime, anywhere."

But random testing will surely run into civil liberties challenges,
experts say. Canada has never allowed random alcohol breathalyzer
testing. "If you can't test randomly for alcohol, there's no way on
earth you're going to test randomly for drugs," Beirness said.

The debate doesn't end with what detection tools or methods work best.
There's also no consensus over how much of a certain drug one has to
consume before they become impaired.

Some have said five nanograms per millilitre of blood should be the
limit for cannabis, while others have said it should be 10.

"The jury is still out," Beirness said.

At least a dozen U.S. states have opted for a strict zero tolerance
policy where the detection of any amount of drug in one's system could
lead to criminal sanction.

But critics have said such an approach could lead to a perception that
the policy is less about traffic safety and more about going after
drug users.
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MAP posted-by: Matt