“Examining Drug-Impaired Driving.”
Chairman
I am uniquely qualified to testify today. My son
That night in July, Dustin had not been drinking. He was doing what most kids like to do and was hanging out with friends when they decided to go grab a pizza. My husband Skip and I had talked to both of our sons about not drinking until age 21 and never drinking and driving. We also talked to them about the dangers of riding in a car with a drunk driver. I'll never know why Dustin got into the car that night, but I am sure and tests showed that he was sober and had buckled his seat belt. Unfortunately the driver, his friend, had been drinking and had illicit drugs in her system.
The pizza run turned tragic when the driver lost control of her car and it careened off the road into a river. The driver and passenger escaped, but not my Dustin.
Early the next morning, Skip and I got that knock on the door that no parent should ever receive. The pain of losing someone so senselessly to a 100 percent preventable crime never goes away. That's why we must work harder than ever to eliminate drunk and drugged driving.
In 2015,
The NAS and IIHS reports are important because recent headlines would lead you to believe that drug impaired driving has overtaken drunk driving in terms of highway deaths. This is not true.
The truth is that we do not know how many people are killed each year due to drug impaired driving. There are two major obstacles to determining the scope of the problem. First, we lack impairment standards for drugs. According to the 2013-2014
In addition to impairment, most states and localities do not have standard testing to determine if drivers involved in fatal crashes were impaired by drugs. This means we do not have a good estimate on how many people are actually killed by drug impaired drivers.
There is a key difference between 'drug presence' and 'drug impairment.'
Other than alcohol, marijuana is the drug that is most frequently detected in drivers' systems after a vehicle crash. The
The Campaign to Eliminate Drunk Driving
With alcohol impairment, we know what works.
Since 2006,
Finally,
The concept for DADSS emerged from a 2006
Needless to say, as an organization that represents the victims of drunk driving, we are impatient to see successful completion of this program. In this regard, we support the language in the
Recommendations to Move Forward
We must encourage law enforcement agencies all across the country to make traffic enforcement a priority. Sobriety checkpoints and saturation patrols catch and deter drunk and drugged drivers.
We also support proper training for law enforcement that helps them detect drugged drivers. Every law enforcement officer should receive Standardized Field Sobriety Testing (SFST) training. This is the basic roadside test that police use to help determine impairment. Next, the Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement (ARIDE) training provides an additional level of training to help detect drug impairment. Finally, we support the Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) program which is an intensive training course that gives officers the knowledge to identify drug impairment more definitively and provide expert testimony in a court of law.
In addition to law enforcement training, prosecutors need to know best practices to obtain drugged driving convictions. We support the Traffic Safety Resource Prosecutors (TSRP) who help train prosecutors in order to get drunk and drugged driving convictions.
Research and Data
In the short term, our focus must be on providing law enforcement with the necessary resources to get drunk and drugged drivers off the road. In the mid to long term, we need to focus on conducting further research and improving data to understand the scope of the drugged driving problem and measure the level of impairment associated with different amounts of drugs.
One important piece of research that we urge
The NRS is critical to the highway safety community as we try to better understand drunk and drug impaired driving. In fact, it is one of the few data points available to give us a sense of what is really happening on the roads in terms of presence. The 2013-2014 NRS found that there has been a large decrease in the percentage of drivers who were alcohol positive, from 35.9 percent in 1973 to 8.3 percent in 2013-2014. For BrACs of .08 and higher, there was a decrease from 7.5 percent in 1973 to 1.5 percent in 2013-2014, revealing an impressive 80 percent reduction in the percentage of alcohol-impaired drivers on the road on weekend nights.
In contrast, THC was the most widely found drug and the prevalence increased from 8.6 percent in 2007 to 12.6 percent in 2014. This can be attributed to the widely changing landscape of marijuana legalization and medical marijuana legalization. It should be emphasized that the survey identifies only the presence of drugs and not impairment.
The information from the roadside survey is critical to tracking the prevalence of drug presence among drivers, and we urge the committee to work with your colleagues to restore funding for the NRS.
With the prevalence of marijuana legalization, both recreational and medicinal, it is critical that more work be done to understand impairment. We agree with a recent
In addition to impairment, we encourage more testing to determine the presence and amounts of drugs among drivers in crashes. Most states and localities do not have standard testing to determine if drivers involved in fatal crashes were impaired by drugs. This means we do not have a good estimate on how many deaths occur in crashes of drivers with drugs in their systems or who are impaired.
Closing
In closing, I encourage the
Law enforcement is our best defense against drunk and drugged drivers. We urge the committee to work with law enforcement leaders to make sure that traffic enforcement is a priority. In addition, proper training such as SFST, ARIDE, and DRE are important tools police need to detect driver impairment, make arrests, and ultimately convict.
Finally, it is critical that we have the research and data needed to better understand the problem of drugged driving.
Thank you again for the opportunity to testify before your committee. I am happy to answer any questions you might have.
Read this original document at: http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IF/IF17/20180711/108525/HHRG-115-IF17-Wstate-Sheehy-ChurchC-20180711.pdf
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