Public//Enemy said:
Nobody should be intoxicated while driving its a safety hazard. Period.
Agreed. Nobody should be driving intoxicated.
Public//Enemy said:
This is a very complex area of the law just because someone can handle drugs better certainly cant allow them to drive as it would be prejudice and difficult proving.
It's complex, no doubt, but what I'm saying is that the presence of a given chemical is not a reliable indicator of intoxication. If one beer gets me as intoxicated as 7 beers gets the average person, then I should know better than to drive after one beer. And if I drove in that state, regardless of the alcohol levels in my blood, it would be fair to prosecute me for impaired/intoxicated driving. Or if I had stayed up for 7 days on caffeine pills and was twitching and incoherent and driving like a drunken 5-year old, it should be considered impaired driving as well.
I don't see how it would be prejudiced to prosecute based on actual impairment; it seems much more fair both to the defendant and society at large.
As the laws stand - in the U.S., and to the best of my knowledge Canada too - it would be very difficult to prosecute someone who was impaired but did not test positive for drugs or alcohol above the legal limit. A good lawyer could probably get you out of it even if you were totally wasted as long as your sample of blood/saliva/breath/urine turned out legal. At the same time, even with alcohol, some people get in major trouble without being impaired in the slightest. Looking at marijuana and other drugs that are less straightforward to test for, there's tons of potential for abuse on the gov't's part - ie the smoked last night but sober now situation. Regardless of how confident in these tests Sgt Burrows may be, there's no way to make a perfect test. You can't check for all drugs that have or ever will be discovered, discern whether they are in concentrations high enough to cause impairment, and do so without false positives that will land law abiding citizens in jail.
Solution? Change the law so that a battery of impairment assessments is the criteria for punishment, not a chemical test. If we did that, it would be easy to prosecute the real criminals - intoxicated/impaired drivers - rather than people who fail tests that aren't even necessarily related to their driving capabilities at the time.
Sure, it would take awhile for people to get used to thinking this way, but realistically the ppl who would be screwing up are the same people who already think they can get away with driving like an idiot on liquor/ketamine/a handful of somas/etc.
