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11/26/2002: "DRUG CZAR, PROHIBITION ESTABLISHMENT SEEK "ZERO TOLERANCE" FOR "DRUGGED DRIVING""

Source: The Week Online with DRCnet Issue #264
http://www.drcnet.org/wol/264.html

Sober Marijuana Users in the Crosshairs

In a coordinated series of announcements beginning late last week, federal agencies and private sector prohibitionists opened a new front in the drug war -- this time targeting "drugged driving." But the solution they are proposing, "zero-tolerance" laws that would consider drivers with even the "mere presence" of illicit drugs in their system as guilty of Driving While Intoxicated ( DWI, or in the drug czar's lexicon, DUID -- driving under the influence of drugs ), seems designed more to further criminalize marijuana smokers than to improve highway safety.

It is one of the cruel ironies of the drug war that relatively innocuous marijuana -- by far the most widely used illicit drug -- remains detectable in peoples' blood for up to 10 days after smoking a single joint.

Under the "zero-tolerance" model legislation the drug czar and others are proposing, the person who smoked a joint on Friday night could be busted for DWI a week later and regular pot smokers, in whom cannanaboid metabolites are presumably always present, could be subject to a DWI arrest any time they got behind the wheel.

Eight states ( Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Utah ) currently have what are referred to as "per se" laws, meaning the mere presence of illicit drug metabolites is considered evidence of intoxication. The rest of the nation should follow their lead, said Dr. Michael Walsh, head of the President's Advisory Committee on Drugs under President Bush the elder, and lead author of a massive study of drugged driving done under the auspices of the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation's ( RWJF ) Substance Abuse Research Program and the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Substance Abuse.

(continued, read [more...])

jini|66.20.225.114|[email protected]||2|11|26|2002|6|31|15|AM|Australia: No Proof Cannabis Put Drivers At Risk

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1849/a09.html?420

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