by GRAHAM SIEVERS, communications manager of Concateno
THE ROAD safety campaign charity Brake chose to highlight the dangers of both drink and drug driving as its main theme for Road Safety Week, which runs every November. Its campaign poster read: Not a drag; not a drop. Its website states that a sixth of deaths that occur on the roads are due to drink-driving, and that researchers believe the same is true for drugdriving.
Very soon the government has said it will publish its response to the consultation document A Safer Way, which last year invited all-comers to put forward their suggestions to help improve safety on our roads and reduce significantly the numbers of serious injuries and fatalities that occur. Eight people a day die on the UK’s roads and nearly ten times that (76) are seriously injured in roads crashes.
The Road Safety Act (1967) introduced the first legal drink-driving limit in the UK and the breathalyser was introduced the same year by the then-Transport Minister, Barbara Castle.
So over 30 years, through a mixture of enforcement and extensive government campaigns, the idea of drinking and driving has in general become socially unacceptable.
But what of drug-driving?
There are far fewer government campaigns run on the issue – this summer’s ‘dilated pupils’ TV crusade, for all its faults, was a significant step towards redressing the balance; but not surprisingly recent surveys indicate that we are less aware of the similar dangers that arise from drug-driving.
There are serious difficulties in enforcement, too. There are no standard quantitative limits for illicit or medicinal drugs in the body as there is for alcohol, so as the law stands the police are required to prove impairment of driving while under the influence of drugs.
Police officers can use a field impairment test (FIT) to check whether motorists are safe behind the wheel. Drivers have to do things such as walk in a straight line and count out 30 seconds in their head. It’s not scientific; it takes time to carry out and requires officers to undergo a training course to be able to perform it.
In 2007 fewer than 600 drivers were arrested using the FIT test, compared to nearly 80,000 drunkdrivers arrested for failing a breathalyser.
It is possible to carry out research to determine what levels of each of the popular illicit and medicinal drugs are liable to cause impairment, but in truth it is an unlikely proposition.
So, instead of bringing the science in line with the current law it has been suggested by a number of organisations such as ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) and Brake that the law should be brought in line with the science.
In other words, legislative changes should be made that will make it an offence to be driving with an illicit drug in the body.
That way, roadside drug testing devices that are available today could be used by police forces to simply, quickly and very visibly support awareness campaigns on the risks and dangers of driving while under the influence of drugs.
I have a commercial interest in that position – my company makes such devices. However, most of my years in the field of drug testing have been focused specifically on the use of laboratory-based hair analysis for child protection case work and not on oral fluids analysis for use in mobile drug test devices. When I discovered that other countries, such as Australia, have successfully introduced this type of per se legislation for drug-driving offences, there is a significant safety issue that overrides the commercial interest.
The evidence of the success of such laws is impressive: in the State of Victoria, for example, over a four-year period since the testing of drivers began in 2004, the number of drivers caught with drugs in their system had dropped by almost a half: from one in 44 to one in 76.
It is, of course, both education and enforcement together which contribute significantly to public awareness to bring down fatalities and injuries on the road, and the Australian model exemplifies this. We will know soon whether the UK’s Department for Transport will take that evidence into account and propose similar legislative changes to meet the challenge of substance misuse on our roads.
Graham Sievers works for Concateno, Europe’s leading drug and alcohol test provider. He can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..