Drug strategy
Back to Driving & Road SafetyIntroduction to Driving and Road Safety
Driving, in general terms, is an emotive issue that affects large and powerful vested commercial interests and public concerns, sensitivities and freedoms.
Drink driving is now firmly established in public and legal attitudes as an unacceptable behaviour. Impairment through drugs is also unacceptable but the issues are a good deal more complex than drink driving because:
- Drug use can affect driving in different ways and there are many drugs and combinations of drugs and drugs can also be taken with alcohol
- Drug detection/screening devices are becoming available but a robust hand-held device for use by police at the roadside is still in development. Presence of drugs, however, is only part of the equation, the issue is impairment of driving. The police are now being trained to recognise the outward signs of drug use and trained to use testing techniques (divided attention, co-ordination) to help them make judgements about impairment, all of which facilitates enforcement
- Research continues into the numbers who do actually drive whilst impaired (for example monitoring how the police use their new techniques) and on the effects of some drugs on driving
- Driving whilst impaired through the effects of medicines is treated no differently than impairment through illegal drugs - the issue here is to continue to educate users of the risks and to improve the warnings on products. There is little evidence to suggest that users of medicines drive impaired or do not pay attention to existing warnings
