Lawyer feels Ottawa over-blowing upcoming drug-impaired driving ‘crisis’
Posted June 26, 2018 7:21 am.
Last Updated June 26, 2018 7:42 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It has been close to a week since Ottawa paved the way for fully legal marijuana this fall and a local lawyer is predicting police will come out swinging this October, at least when it comes to impaired driving.
But she doesn’t think the blitz will last or that enforcement will be an issue over the long term.
“I actually don’t see it being as big of a crisis as the federal government has been suggesting that it is going to be,” says Kyla Lee, a criminal lawyer in Vancouver who specializes in driving law.
“We have existing administrative schemes in British Columbia, as well as existing federal criminal law to deal with drug-impaired driving that are already easy for police to enforce and are effective.”
Lee points to the series of roadside physical coordination tests, which officers can administer very quickly.
“The first is called horizontal gaze nystagmus, which is basically tracking a pen with your eyes. The second is standing on one leg for 30 second and measuring your balance. The third is walking the line,” she tells NEWS 1130.
“Police are permitted to rely on those results to take a person off the road for 24 hours if they don’t perform well. Alternatively they can use the results of those tests to make an arrest and do further testing at the police station.”
But Lee says officers don’t need a coordination test to take a driver off the road.
“As long as the officer has reasonable grounds to believe that a person’s ability to drive is impaired or affected by a drug, then the officer can issue a 24 hour prohibition. That can even be pulling someone over after observing some unusual driving and engaging in conversation at which point they learn some information that leads them to believe the driver has recently consumed drugs. That could be smelling burned marijuana or observing some physical coordination problems,” she explains.
Lee feels police will be using those tools a lot after recreational marijuana is legalized October 17.
“At the beginning, we will see an uptick in the number of roadblocks. That usually happens any time there is a substantial change in the laws that relate to driving — it’s a social phenomenon known as the ‘announcement effect.’ That adds to an increase in enforcement and apprehensions and then the numbers drop back to around where they were to begin with.”
Lee feels police will make a concerted effort to ramp up enforcement to start, but it will not be sustained over the long term.
MADD CANADA worries about increased usage of marijuana
Eric Dumschat, the legal counsel for MADD Canada, worries the pending legalization of pot means those roadblocks will be needed.
“When you make a legal recreational market, usage rates will increase. In the year after Washington state legalized recreational cannabis use, the number and percentage of THC-positive drivers in fatal crashes approximately doubled,” he says.
“Similarly, fatalities involving cannabis-positive drivers increased 44 per cent in the year after Colorado legalized recreational cannabis use. These fatalities had been falling in the years prior to legalization.”
But Dumschat believes Canadian police officers are up to the task.
“Roadside testing will be paired with police officers who are trained to give suspected high drivers the standardized sobriety test and the drug recognition evaluation. We feel that, when you combine these two methods, it will do a reasonably good job of both catching and deterring drivers who are impaired by drugs.”
However, Dumschat hopes that federal funding will be made available to further develop the science of roadside screening, allowing it to become quicker, cheaper, more exact and able to detect a wider range of drugs.
– With files from Amanda Wawryk and Denise Wong
