Roadside Drink & Drug Tests

Hitting the headlines on and off in the past few years has been the debate of roadside drug testing. With breathe testing for drink having been around for years and many other countries already using drug testing too, its time the UK caught up, but at what cost?

The invention of the roadside breathe test for drink drivers years ago has saved thousands of lives and plans are in place to soon have a drug test too. Its delay has come due to inaccurate readings and innocent people testing positive. Countries like Italy already use roadside drug testing successfully and it would be a more than welcome inclusion for us too. Drugs substantially impair the senses as much as alcohol does and sometimes even worse. At the moment all the Police can do is arrest someone for ‘suspicion of driving whilst under the influence of drink or drugs’ if they have reasonable grounds to suspect. The problem is at the moment they feel they have to be absolutely certain so to not waste their own time or others, and it can at time be difficult to tell. Once arrested and in the Police Station, a blood and urine sample would be given.

With the proposed testing, as with the current breathe test for drinking, all that would be required would be a quick one minute test at the side of the road, initially saving time in case of a negative reading, and lives if a positive sample was produced.

The problems being encountered at the moment and delaying its inclusion is the fact the drug testing at the moment can’t stipulate between illegal and legal drugs. Some legal over-the-counter drugs such as cough medicines, pain killers and anti-anxiety pills amongst others, are likely to trigger a positive reading in proposed saliva-based testing, which are still awaiting Home Office approval.

Many of these legal prescription drugs belong to the same family as illegal drugs and the saliva test is currently unable to distinguish between them. Its agued this will still save many lives and ministers say ‘the ends will justify the means’. But is it really fair if innocent people were regularly arrested because they ‘might’ have taken an illegal drug? Even if they can show evidence of what they are taking via prescription, they are still sure to be arrested as how would the officers know they’re not lying? This would waste the time of an innocent person and take another officer off our streets for no reason at all.

There are huge grey areas at the moment where drug testing is conce
ed. These roadside tests are badly needed as drug driving is commonplace. I spend a lot of time on the road and on regular occasions I can either see, or smell that a driver is smoking cannabis. And that’s just one drug of many. But, I don’t think it can be brought in until we have one that works properly. Imagine if it was you arrested because you are on a prescribed cough medicine? You would be arrested, booked into the Police station, put in a cell, have your fingerprints taken which would then be on the system forever, and you’d have a night in the cells so whatever drug you’re are suspected to have taken wears off.

The public would never accept this and rightly so, but the sooner we have a good drink-drug tester the better.

Jason Vines