Roll and smoke

>> Conference reveals little consensus
on drugging and driving

by STEPHANIE LAPOINTE

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 Sûreté du Québec 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 Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (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. :