Assembly Bill 1356 has made its way to Capitol Hill and, if passed, would allow law enforcement to use a device similar to a breathalyzer that could detect the presence of marijuana and a number of other drugs in a driver’s system in a matter of minutes.
“It’s very clear that the usage of marijuana is becoming more and more common,” said Assemblyman Tom Lackey from Palmdale, California, who proposed the law.
The law would expand California’s current implied consent law to “provide that a person who drives a motor vehicle is deemed to have given his or her consent to chemical testing of his or her blood or oral fluids for the purpose of determining the drug content of his or her blood or oral fluids.”
Currently, if law enforcement want to test for the presence of drugs in a driver’s system following the lawful arrest of that driver, they need to withdraw blood which could take hours.
According to CBS San Francisco, officers would be able to use a portable drug detection device called Alere™ DDS®2 that would allow law enforcement to perform a test on drivers’ oral fluids gathered from the gum line and cheeks. The swabbed fluid samples could provide results within five minutes according to the device’s developers.
"We’d be testing for marijuana, cocaine, opiates, amphetamines, methamphetamines and benzodiazepine," said Fred Delfino, spokesperson for Alere DDS 2, the company behind the new device.
You may recall from my previous posts that the Los Angeles Police Department had been given a federal grant to test these devices.
“The number of drugged drivers is increasing rapidly, and those of us in law enforcement simply do not have the tools necessary to determine the level of impairment on anything other than alcohol,” said Ron Lawrence, chief of police for Rocklin. “If the legalization of marijuana is in our future, we in California law enforcement need to be prepared to deal with the roadways and safety precautions of tomorrow."
The problem is that the device does not test for impairment. It only tests for the presence of the drugs.
It has yet to be determined what amount of drugs found in a person’s system will constitute impairment. According to Lackey, that part of the bill has not yet been worked out.
There is an established correlation between blood alcohol content, specifically the legal limit of 0.08 percent, and alcohol impairment. Unlike alcohol, however, there is no such correlation between the presence of drugs and impairment.
"I think that people want to have a clear-cut, black-and-white solution," says Mason Tvert, the communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project, a pro-legalization group. "They want a specific number that we can use to just say that this person is impaired or not. Unfortunately, it’s a little more of a gray area than that."
Unfortunately, Tvert is correct and that gray area can lead to sober drivers getting arrested for DUI of marijuana.
Tetrahydrocannabinol or THC is the active component of marijuana. Unlike alcohol which dissipates after several hours, THC can stay in a person’s system for weeks at a time and well after the person has smoked.
Simply put, the mere presence of THC in a person does not necessarily mean that the person is impaired and incapable of safely operating a vehicle and the new device, if AB1356 passes, could be used to prosecute sober drivers.
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