Drug-driving injustice must be addressed

[lookinggoodguys]

http://www.themercury.com.au/news/opinion/talking-point-drugdriving-injustice-must-be-addressed/news-story/31f8c07b5f3ea65b0eda50581dcb113f

 

 

ON Friday, Tony Mulder, a Legislative Council MP and former senior member of Tasmania Police articulated in the Talking Point pages the unfairness of the drink-driving law regime in this state.

The other area of road safety regulation that is also grossly inequitable and offensive to the rule of law is the drug-driving regime.

Australia was the first country in the world to adopt drug-driving laws, with Tasmania being the second jurisdiction to adopt such laws in 2005. In Tasmania, police can randomly stop drivers and test their saliva by the roadside for detectable quantities of substances such as cannabis or methamphetamine. Having a laboratory-confirmed positive result is itself an offence. It does not matter that there was no evidence the driver was in any way impaired in their capacity to drive safely.

The penalty for a first-time “offender” is a mandatory minimum three months’ loss of licence and a minimum of six months off the road for a subsequent offence. There are severe monetary penalties that go with this offence and jail time is on the cards if the offender has previous serious driving convictions. People lose their jobs because of these absurd laws.

Australian Law Reform Foundation chairman Alex Wodak, without peer as the nation’s leading drug law expert, articulates the unfairness and lack of scientific basis for such laws.

“The idea is that roadside drug-driving tests will deter people who have taken drugs from driving and thereby improve road safety. It all sounds very compelling —especially when road safety experts argue that the more roadside drug tests carried out, the fewer the number of road crashes. Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as this and this is where the injustice lies,” Dr Wodak argues.

Unlike alcohol and driving where there is a good deal of scientific evidence to support a correlation between increased road crash risk and increasing blood-alcohol concentrations, in the case of drugs such as cannabis there is no such link.

A recent paper by Andrea Roth, Associate Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that the few single-car crash and case control studies that have been conducted have found no relationship between THC blood levels and an increased relative crash risk.

The paper, published in the California Law Review in August exhaustively surveys the studies on cannabis and driving that have been done worldwide.

As Dr Wodak notes, one of the problems with “zero tolerance” drug-driving laws is they punish some drivers who are not impaired as a way of deterring other drivers who might be impaired or might become impaired.

This is what we call vicarious punishment and it offends basic notions of fairness. Such a system of penalties has no place in a system that ought to be about justice not tyranny.

This injustice is magnified by virtue of the fact a driver can take a prescription drug and drive despite the impact it might have on his reflexes and not face criminal penalty.

 

The gross injustice, courtesy of the complete lack of scientific foundation, of drug-driving laws will be made worse when medical cannabis is legal in Tasmania.

What will happen to people lawfully taking medicinal cannabis for a diagnosed medical condition who are found to have detectable quantities of cannabis in their saliva?

US states which have wisely legalised cannabis are dealing with such a dilemma.

It is time Tasmanian Parliament looked at drug-driving laws, given the inherent unfairness of the current legislative settings.

Such a review should examine evidence around the concentration of legal or pharmaceutical drugs in blood or saliva and the extent of any driving impairment. Mr Mulder’s call for rational, fair drink-driving laws could be included in the inquiry.

There also needs to be, alongside such an inquiry, work by the University of Tasmania, through its Menzies Health Institute, looking at the data on drugs such as cannabis and driving.

As Prof Roth notes in her paper, the US drink-driving legislative framework was a result of epidemiological studies.

In the 1960s in the US, epidemiologist William Haddon and a research team conducted meticulous studies with thousands of motorists that showed precise increased relative crash risks as precise BACs.

It is shameful legislators in Tasmania force courts to impose injustice on a daily basis because of unscientific, myth-based, drug-driving laws. Mr Mulder’s call last week for fairer, evidence-based penalties for drink-driving laws should trigger a rethink of a legal framework for drugs, alcohol and driving.

Lawyer Greg Barns was an adviser to NSW Liberal premier Nick Greiner and the Howard government. Disendorsed as the Liberal candidate for Denison in 2002, he joined the Democrats. In 2013, he was Wikileaks Party adviser.

[Naycha]

Thanks for posting that lgg. People need to bring this up with their relevant members of parliament. A lot of them are probably ignorant of the unfairness of the saliva tests and would probably agree that they are unfair once they have the relevant information.