Risk in tablets

On the roads, drugs are fraught with a deadly risk

Americans are using more and more drugs, but unlike alcohol, there is no law that regulates the amount of drugs in the blood while driving. This is increasingly worrying cops all over...

Americans are using more and more drugs, but unlike alcohol, there is no law that regulates the amount of drugs in the blood while driving. This is increasingly worrying police officers across the country.

The fact is that the police cannot charge a driver who is under the influence of a drug legally prescribed to him.

“How do you strike a balance between the fact that some people have to take medication prescribed by their doctor and the need to keep others safe?” asks Mark Neal, Senior Legal Counsel at the National Highway Law Center.

Establishing drug limits for drivers is also difficult because the chemistry of drugs makes their behavioral effects much less predictable than for alcohol. Some drugs remain in the body for days or even weeks.

"Everyone knows not to drive after drinking," says Gil Kerlikowski, Obama's chief drug and drug policy adviser. “We need to explain to people that the same applies to drugs.”

The problem is growing so fast that police officers in some states are already being trained to spot signs of dangerous drug exposure and are being offered to equip police with devices to more accurately identify drivers who shouldn't be allowed to drive.

The exact number of drivers driving cars under the influence of permitted drugs is not known, according to statistics, they are equated to drunk driving. But a 2007 study by the National Highway Safety Administration that tested 5,900 drivers found that at least 16.3% of them were driving while under the influence of both legal and illegal drugs.

“We don't want to raise a panic,” Karlikowski says. “But society needs to realize the scale of the threat. Driving under the influence of legal drugs can lead to consequences no less tragic than exceeding the legal dose of alcohol, and the driver will have to bear full responsibility for their actions.

According to police, anyone who drives a car under the influence of drugs prescribed to him is at risk of being jailed, even if he follows all the rules of the road.

For example, in April 2008, a former doctor from Wisconsin, driving a Honda Accord, caused a collision that killed the pregnant driver of the second car and her ten-year-old daughter. In court, the prosecution argued that a blood test from a former doctor revealed a high content of an explosive mixture of the sleeping pill Ambien, the sedative Xanax and the opiate-based anesthetic Oxycodone. The driver was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Defendants often claim that they did not know that the medication they were taking affects their ability to drive. According to the prosecutor's office, this argument could be deliberately disavowed in the event that a corresponding warning was applied to all packages with the medicine without fail.

“Would you be in such a state, for example, felling a tree with a chainsaw? says Deputy Sheriff of Calvert County in Maryland, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Hale. "Then why do you decide to drive?"

For the most part, in drug-drug trials, the prosecution relies on the testimony of "drug experts," that is, police officers who have been specially trained to recognize the signs that a driver is incapable of driving. But in the United States, only 7,000 police officers received such training.

Jurors are generally reluctant to convict those who drive while under the influence of drugs. The only exceptions are the most egregious cases, says Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gensler.

“Since most jurors are also likely to be on some kind of prescribed medication,” Gensler says, “some kind of sedative, allergy pills or something else, they don’t want to convict those accused of such crimes.”