Drink Diving in Australia

For a country that is known to love a beer - or two - Australia has taken a hard stance on drink driving for decades. We weren't the first country to discourage it, or even the first to enforce it, but after more than 30 years of public campaigns and random breath testing there is a certain knowledge in the national psyche that driving while under the influence won't get you very far.
Yes, attitudes have changed and ways to enforce it through new technologies have changed. But times have changed too, and as much as alcohol is still a big issue so too are other forms of recreational drugs.
Illegal drugs are not new, but, following the lead of some European countries and some of the more liberal states in the US like Colorado and Washington, there is ever-growing pressure on governments to relax laws - even legalise and control - the use of some drugs, particularly Marijuana.
So, in this special report, we take a look at how Australia presently handles drug driving, and, if circumstances were to alter, look at how others have adapted to changing times.
How big is the problem?
First of all, are we really drug-driving more?
Since the Australian introduction of mobile roadside drug testing in 2004 the number of drivers pulled over for a saliva swab has drastically increased.
The former NSW roads minister Duncan Gay declared in 2015 that the number of roadside drug tests undertaken would increase from 32,000 to 97,000 by this year. If you have driven in NSW recently you may have spotted a mobile drug testing unit as the state government continues to crack down on drug affected drivers.
According to a Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research report, the number of people being charged and convicted for drug-driving has increased 1.9 per cent across Australia between 2014 and 2016. So the short answer is yes.
Why it's a problem
We know that drugs effect our ability to adequately perform tasks. Prescription drugs come with detailed instructions on what not to do after taking them but illicit drugs don't come with warning labels.
Methamphetamine, found in the drug ice can make you feel indestructible. Benzodiazepine can make you drowsy. And cannabis will probably have you reaching for the Doritos.
Jokes aside, both stimulants and depressants affect your driving skills in different ways. While stimulants encourage risky behaviour, depressants slow down your reaction time. A National Institute on Drug Abuse study found cannabis to impair a driver's ability to avoid lane weaving and brake adequately, apparently at a similar level to a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08.
How police test drivers
The NSW government estimated that in 2015 that one in 10 roadside drug tests came back positive, compared to one in 300 breath tests for alcohol.
This doesn't necessarily mean people are driving around high as a kite. But it does show that there are people in NSW driving with traces of drugs in their system.
According to Mayo Medical Laboratories in the US, cannabis can return a positive result three days after use, but the NSW government claim a roadside drug test will only return a positive result within 12 hours of use. So, no matter whether you smoked a joint a week ago or went on an ice binge that day, the test can't pinpoint if you are impaired, just that there are certain amounts of either cannabis, methamphetamine or MDMA present.
This was the case for Lismore man Joseph Ross Carrall, who after taking advice from police in May 2015 to wait a week after smoking marijuana before driving, was arrested for drug-driving the next month - nine days after smoking a joint. Carrall was found not guilty after the magistrate concluded he had made an "honest and reasonable mistake of fact".
While experts continue to reassure motorists that the potential of a "false positive" is highly unlikely, the fact still remains that the saliva swab tests for traces rather than discerning whether the driver is affected by drugs at the time of driving.
Who is driving high?
It may sound obvious, but a five-year study of chronic drug users conducted by multiple institutes in Australia found they are more likely to drive whilst high than the average Australian.
Of the 1,913 users that volunteered to take part in the survey the typical person was a 30-40-year-old man whose first language was English and hadn't completed high school. Alarmingly, some users admitted to driving within an hour of ingesting drugs
The type of drugs they admitted to using ranged from marijuana to Benzodiazepines but the most commonly used one among the participants was heroin. Controversially, as an opiate, heroin isn't one of the drugs subject to mobile testing.
Another outcome of the study was that researchers found the likelihood of users to drive after taking drugs actually decreased over the five years. It is not clear whether that's because police have deterred drug impaired people from driving or a change in behaviour.
Selective testing
Cocaine is widely used across major cities, but it is left off the test strip.
The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission's recent report indicated a substantial increase in cocaine related arrests in all states except for the ACT and the Northern Territory. It's understandable why Sydney is nicknamed the cocaine capital with 53.7 per cent of Australia's cocaine arrests taking place within NSW borders.
The other drug missing from test kits is benzodiazepine, which is found in prescription drugs like Valium, Xanax and Klonopin and are known to impair a person's ability to drive and also make them drowsy.
Some consider this type of selective testing a class issue. Greens MP David Shoebridge says "there is no question that the police are targeting drug driving tests against those parts of the state that are less wealthy. It's more class warfare from the Coalition government".
Yet, it is not a question of whether it's technically possible to test for cocaine. Dräger, the company supplying police drug test kits, claims its products are able to test for cocaine and other drugs that Australia currently doesn't test for, like opiates.
One drug testing system that could be worth learning from is in the United Kingdom. The British government recently enforced drug-driving limits for illegal and prescription drugs. Their reasoning for setting limits for illicit drugs like cocaine was to allow for accidental exposure, like passive smoking. Right now, a driver in the UK can have up to 10 micrograms of cocaine per litre of blood before it's considered illegal drug driving.
In total, police in the UK can test for 16 different drugs compared to three in Australia. Some can be tested roadside while others require blood and urine tests. Included on the list are prescription drugs like diazepam and methadone but also the hallucinogenic LSD. The UK has harsher penalties for those found guilty of drug-driving, with a minimum 12 month driving ban and a fine of up to £5,000 ($8500).
It is clear that testing someone's ability to drive under the influence of cannabis isn't as straightforward as alcohol. That might change as tech companies take the breathalyser typically used for testing a driver's blood alcohol concentration and create a viable marijuana breathalyser. Cannabix Technologies in Canada is currently testing a product that can determine if someone has consumed marijuana within a three-hour period. It is a promising step, but also an expensive one. Cannabix Technologies estimates one breathalyser will be sold for $1,000 USD.
While it sounds expensive, considering how costly our current method of testing is, a marijuana breathalyser could be worth the investment. A 2014 report conducted by Curtin University found that on average it cost $38 to perform one roadside drug test, this includes the police officers' time and the test itself. In total between 2013 and 2014 it cost the federal government over $6million for all mobile drug tests to go from roadside testing to laboratory results. And this was before the drug crackdown.
The Colorado experience
Some states in America have a different approach to drugs than Australia.
In the US, 26 states and one district have legalised either recreational or medicinal marijuana use and most still rely on field sobriety tests as means as testing for driving under the influence. In simple terms, that means a police officer assesses your ability to walk in a straight and count to 30 if they suspect you of driving under the influence. It's far less black-and-white than in Australia where you will be instructed to stick out your tongue and have someone scrape off some saliva, but it also brings its own problems.
Colorado legalized recreational marijuana in 2012 and one of the major issues it now faces is accurately testing a driver's impairment. Part of the response is that Colorado has increased the number of police officers trained in advanced roadside impaired driving enforcement, but there are still challenges. One is that they recently imposed a marijuana driving limit of five nanograms of active tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the chemical compound in marijuana that makes a person high.
However, scientists (and pro weed advocates) claim that the level of THC in someone's system is completely dependent on the individual's metabolism since THC is fat soluble. A person with a speedy metabolism could have a THC reading of more than five nanograms but feel completely fine whereas someone with a slower metabolism might be higher than both Cheech and Chong.
The numbers don't look good in any case. NSW has two million more residents than Colorado yet it experienced as many road fatalities in one year than NSW recorded over a three-year period. The Colorado department of transport claims this increase in fatalities is down to drug use.

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