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U.S. says "drugged driving" growing threat
Cars run on the I-95 highway in Miami in this May 15, 2007 file photo.
Credit: Reuters/Carlos Barria
VIENNA |
VIENNA (Reuters) - Motorists under the influence of drugs are a growing threat on U.S. roads, while the number who drink and drive has fallen thanks to education and law enforcement, a top U.S. drug control official said on Tuesday.
The United States is calling for discussions at United Nations level to tackle "drugged driving" and says it wants to collect data to gauge the scale of the problem among public sector drivers and commercial truckers.
"If you think about driving on an American road on a Friday or Saturday evening about 16 percent of the vehicles - one in six of the cars - (the driver) will be under the influence of an illicit or licit drug," Gil Kerlikowske, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, said.
"Drugged driving is a significant problem." he told reporters at a week-long U.N. drug policy review meeting.
Kerlikowske, a former Seattle police chief, said figures showed one of the main problems was with people using marijuana and then getting behind the wheel.
But he said in a statement to the U.N. Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND) meeting in Vienna that both illicit drugs and prescription or other pharmaceutical drugs could cause severe problems on the road.
He described the way in which "drugged driving" hampered judgment, reaction time, driving skills and memory and called for the issue to be debated as an official topic at the next CND meeting in 2011.
He also said the United States' new drug control strategy, to be published in several weeks, will focus more efforts on prevention and treatment of drug abuse while continuing to clamp down on drug trafficking domestically and internationally.
In a separate briefing Kerlikowske's Russian counterpart praised bilateral anti-drug efforts under the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama, particularly in Afghanistan.
"We can say (joint) activity has been intensified (now)," Victor Ivanov, head of the Russian Anti-Narcotics Service told journalists. Russia is the world's largest heroin consumer.
He said the two countries had agreed to conduct operations on certain facilities in Afghanistan, producer of over 90 percent of the world's opium, which fuels a $65 billion illegal market and helps fund the insurgent Taliban.
Ivanov said Russian and U.S. authorities had also exchanged names of people working in the drug trade in Afghanistan that they wanted to target.
(Reporting by Sylvia Westall; Editing by Matthew Jones)
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http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/DOT/NHTSA/Traffic%20Injury%20Control/Articles/Associated%20Files/811175.pdf
“The reader is cautioned that drug presence does not necessarily imply impairment. For many drug types, drug presence can be detected long after any impairment that might affect driving has passed. For example, traces of marijuana can be detected in blood samples several weeks after chronic users stop ingestion. Also, whereas the impairment effects for various concentration levels of alcohol is well understood, little evidence is available to link concentrations of other drug types to driver performance. ”
and
“Caution should be exercised in assuming that drug presence implies driver impairment. Drug tests do not necessarily indicate current impairment. Drug presence can be measured for a period of days or weeks after ingestion in many cases. This latency of drug presence may partially explain the consistency between daytime and nighttime drug findings.”
This is just another effort on the part of the drug czar to promote fear, and Reuters should investigate rather than taking his word for it.
We bust a guy for a pound of pot, cut up into half ounce bags. Boom, felony conviciton, drug dealer, off to jail.
We probably spend $10,000 apprehending and prosecuting him, on average, if not more. We spend $25,000 a year incarcerating him for a year or two or three. We spend $10,000 monitoring him on parole or probation afterwards. We have labelled him a felon, so he has a hard time getting a job. We provide him with thousands of dollars a year in assistance. We lose perhaps thousands per year in taxes.
Society probably spends $75,000 on busting and punishing this guy. To what end? Stupid.
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