Canada: Police exercise new law targeting drivers on drugs

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.

Nobody should be intoxicated while driving its a safety hazard. Period.

Although this does give police the chance to segrigate people again and knowing testing for substance will come back positive even if not intoxicated could prove very frustrating.

to avoid = keep a bottle of that pink shit that clears your piss in 1 hour.. get pulled, drink. act however you like if the rest comes up clean so are you xP

not that i condone the above but i do hate the police haha..
 
Jester-Race said:
Instead of the PD spending money on all of these ridiculous tests, why not legalize drugs and tax it to gain money?

Or am I missing something here?

you are missing the fact, that ;

if they wanted to better our world

they could

they have a different plan
 
"There's seven categories of drugs - cannabis, for example, houses marijuana, hash, hash oil - and what they get back [from the results] is the category," he said.

Are they saying they can get back results that tell them whether its hash, pot or oil etc? what do they test for levels of thc cbd and cbn?

To those of you that think this policy is new, it came into effect a little while ago, so far i haven't heard of any major cases arising, i live in canada. So no need to worry. Youre just as at risk if you drive recklessly.
 
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.
 
The_Idler said:
holy shit, driving on K!?

yeah. no shit. When I do K I become the floor and then melt into oblivion and transcend reality for 45 minutes.

I wouldn't imagine driving on K is very safe at all, or even possible.

perhaps she just did a small amount, but still. That is some heavy shit.
 
Probably been brought up, but just in case this. This is corruption prone due to lasting marijuana in yo' system, and pot doesn't impair driving. Otherwise, people shouldn't drive drunk, and they shouldn't drive on K.
 
I'm all about people being able to do whatever they want to their bodies but driving while impaired is and should be illegal. Putting others at risk is not your right.
 
aanallein said:
I'm all about people being able to do whatever they want to their bodies but driving while impaired is and should be illegal. Putting others at risk is not your right.


Driving carries a risk, sober or not. Being intoxicated obviously increases that risk but so does, bring tired, stressed or hungover, having young children in the car, having poor tyres, dirty windscreen, worn brakes, talking on the phone, not paying attention, driving too fast for the conditions, etc.
 
yeah i agree driving on k is dangerous.

i dunno cops are still pretty chill here about weed, we have been pulled over and found with weed and gotten away at least 5 times now.

now i am not denying this is very lucky, but i hope this doesn't change how the average cop has acted in the past.
 
Ugh.. I think this shit is completely retarded. A 12-step test just because a police officer MAY THINK that your high on drugs? I know it's Canada and I live in America but damn. Where the hell are the rights of the citizens? This is going to be a total waste of money, a waste of time, a possibility of ruining lives because of inaccuracy etc. What the hell are these people thinking? Jesus.
 
"I feel/act high even when I'm sober. Granted I'm not Canadian, how would this affect me if I was? Would I ever be able to drive? "

This is why driving should be banned entirely. Everyone is high on life, it's utterly uncontrollable.
 
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