A car weaves erratically down a Lake County thoroughfare. The Vernon Hills police officer who spots the car recognizes that the driver is clearly impaired. The driver is given a Breathalyzer test but passes easily. There is no alcohol in his system.
On another Lake County road, a police officer pulls over a driver who stumbles through his field sobriety test. The driver is in such bad shape that he cannot count or even recite the alphabet. Again a Breathalyzer is given. Results show that, though the driver may have had a drink earlier, he is not drunk. In fact, his blood-alcohol level measures a scant .01, far below the legal limit.
Another noticably impaired driver is stopped by local police. He, too, fails his field sobriety test, and again there is no evidence of alcohol. But even more puzzling to the arresting officer is the driver`s appearance. The suspect`s face is not just pale, it is stark white.
These incidents from the files of local authorities point to the kinds of cases that confound and frustrate law enforcement agencies. Even when arrested, these impaired drivers are often tough to prosecute. They are cases where driving ability is affected not by drinking but by drugs.
Lake County, snug in suburbia and far from the inner city, is hardly immune from drugged drivers. ”Absolutely they`re out there,” stressed one official. ”Why would Lake County be any different than anywhere else?”
In the examples above, for instance, the Vernon Hills driver turned out to be reacting to his doctor`s prescription. The driver`s medication, to treat symptoms of AIDS, interfered with his driving ability to the extent that he was charged with driving under the influence (DUI). Officers later discovered that he had been picked up in a neighboring community the night before for the same offense.
The stumbling driver with the low alcohol level refused to take a blood test and was then subject to an automatic suspension of his license. But local authorities acknowledge, ”Obviously he was on something, yet we never knew what.”
Typewriter correction fluid had caused the strange appearance and poor driving in the third case. The driver had been sniffing the potent substance and had it smeared all over his face before he was apprehended behind the wheel.
While the results can be just as deadly, there are some marked differences between what is known about drunken driving and what is known about drugged driving. Alcohol can be tied to thousands of crashes each year because it is routinely and easily measured. Forty to 70 percent of collisions nationally include alcohol as a factor, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in Washington.
Current data suggest that the drug and driving problem is substantially less than the alcohol and driving problem, but when drugs other than alcohol are involved, detection and conviction grow more difficult.
According to safety administration spokesman Tim Hurd: ”With alcohol, we`ve had years of research. We have Breathalyzers and roadside tests. The courts have hashed these cases out for years. Now there is starting to be a lot of activity with drugged driving. But there are 20 to 30 different drugs that can be in someone`s system; prescription drugs, over-the-counter drugs, illegal drugs. Drugs are a lot harder to nail down.”
It is difficult to estimate to what extent these accidents occur in Lake County, which is crisscrossed by miles of congested highways. Few statistics exist on drugged driving nationally, but evidence suggests that drugs are a safety threat. A limited safety administration study, presented to Congress in 1988, noted that drugs can be found in 10 percent to 22 percent of crash-involved drivers, often mixed with alcohol.
The Northwestern University Traffic Institute has studied Chicago area crashes. The data taken from 200 emergency-room patients, all of whom were drivers involved in accidents, showed that 54 percent had taken drugs, alcohol or both. Of those, 32 percent were impaired by drugs other than alcohol
(primarily marijuana, cocaine to a lesser degree, and other drugs).
The Northwestern survey found that police reports of the accidents contained no references to drugged driving, despite the fact that about 30 people in the study had significant levels of drugs in their systems.
That the police failed to recognize the effects of drugs is not surprising to experts in the field. ”It`s not as clear-cut as alcohol,”
explained Ted Anderson, safety administration research psychologist, from his Washington office. Some drug-impaired drivers look and act very much like alcohol-impaired drivers. Others look and act very differently.
A look at prescription drug use reveals that during a typical year, more than 60 million prescriptions are written for Valium and related depressants in the United States. Another widely used drug, codeine, is the fourth most often prescribed. Over-the-counter drugs are used even more widely than prescription drugs.
”We don`t really know yet which drugs are problems. Obviously some are for some people,” Anderson said. Questions remain unanswered about the effects of specific drugs on driving skills, what constitutes dangerous dosage levels and the combined effects of drugs and alcohol. Personality factors need to be considered as well-for instance, drug abusers are by nature risk takers and may be reckless drivers to begin with.
The confusion also spills over into the courts. In addition to detection problems and limited research, drugged drivers who are apprehended are hard to convict. Most police officers are not trained in drug recognition or considered drug experts in court.
”If the only evidence is a urine test, a good defense attorney may argue that traces of drugs could be a month old,” Anderson said. ”That may not mean the driver was impaired at the time of the accident; so in many cases the defendant gets off.”
Breathalyzers do not detect drugs; so a police officer who smells liquor on the breath of a driver and suspects alcohol impairment may be surprised when the person scores under .10, the limit law defines as driving under the influence. Said one policeman, ”The officer might think, `Well, I guess this guy just has a low tolerance,` and let him go, or if he does arrest, and it goes to court, the guy just laughs all the way home.”
An inexpensive procedure to test for various drugs is not readily available to law enforcement, which may explain why so few drugged drivers are apprehended. Said James Bryant of the Lake County sheriff`s office, ”Anytime you start getting into drugged driving, the numbers are going to drop dramatically simply because I don`t think we have refined the procedure to the point where we can tell conclusively what it is. It`s really up to conjecture.”
Faced with a DUI suspect, the officer must use his discretion whether a roadside field test, a Breathalyzer exam or hospital blood or urine tests are required. ”But we have to get their approval,” added Bryant, who serves as coordinator for the sheriff`s Traffic Enforcement Unit.
And drugs can be completely legal, yet still bring DUI charges, warned Bryant: ”There`s probably a lot of abuse of prescribed drugs, but we don`t have hard facts on that. Anytime a substance impairs your ability to drive, you are subject to DUI arrest.”
