While the Canadian stoner class eagerly awaits the official launch of the nation’s recreational marijuana market, law enforcement is devising a semi-evil plot to bust motorists — potentially innocent ones — for stoned driving. It is a situation that is bound to spawn an uprising in controversy, lawsuits and heaping piles of unwarranted convictions. Because no matter how this situation is colored, shaped or simply chalked up to “the best we can do,” experts say it is scientifically impossible to target, with any level of real accuracy, only those drivers under the influence of marijuana using the roadside testing methods set to be unleashed in the coming months.
It was just last September that Public Safety Canada committed to dumping an enormous $81 million into a training program designed to help police catch motorists that are high behind the wheel. The agency’s chosen system is a 12-step drug recognition expert (DRE) evaluation, which is said to detect “central nervous system depressants, inhalants, dissociative anesthetics, cannabis, central nervous system stimulants, hallucinogens and narcotic analgesics, ”according to CTV News. It is in the ballpark of the field sobriety test that has been used in the United States for years.
The problem with roadside drug tests, which, more appropriately speaking, should be called pop quizzes, is that they cannot distinguish between a driver who is high right now and those who may have consumed marijuana at some point within the past few weeks. Sadly, because the techniques and technology behind these policing methods are marred with uncertainty, there are even cases in which non-cannabis users – people who have never smoked pot in their entire life — can find themselves jammed up, at least temporarily, on suspicion of drugged driving. Nevertheless, this is how Canada’s police force plans to start nabbing high drivers once the nation starts selling legal weed.
The process will go as follows.
Mike Adams – Forbes – July 15, 2018.
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