Everyone knows that drunk driving can be deadly. It is far too common for a car accident to involve a drunk driver – especially at night. The good news is that strong enforcement of drunk driving laws has helped significantly reduce the amount of drunk driving. However, it is not so easy to take the same action against drivers who are under the influence of drugs.
Keep reading to learn why it is so difficult to prove a driver was under the influence of drugs when they were involved in a car accident. If you have suffered an injury due to a drunk driver, contact Law Offices of Fernando D. Vargas at 909-982-0707 to find out what your options are.
- There Are Many Drugs a Person Could Be Under the Influence Of One of the main issues is that there are many drugs a person could be under. This means that the police would have to no only suspect that the person was under the influence of drugs but then administer the correct test. This is both cost-prohibitive and difficult for an officer on the street to do.
- Testing Positive for a Drug Does Not Always Correlate with Being Under Its Influence The issue with driving after taking drugs is that it can have a negative effect on a person’s executive function in such a way that they cannot drive safely. However, even after the drugs are well worn off and the person is no longer a danger to drive, the drug may still be measurable in the blood.
- People Build Up a Tolerance With alcohol, we can determine a specific BAC at which a driver is no longer safe to drive. This is not true for many drugs. If a person uses drugs all the time, they could have many times the amount in their system as someone who is new to using that drug, and the person with much less could be the only one that is a danger on the roads.
- Drugs Affect People Differently In addition to tolerance, a person’s weight, metabolism, and what they are doing at the time of the test can all impact how the drugs have affected them.
- Drugs May Not Show Up in the Drug Stream Even Though They Are Still Affecting the Driver Just like a person could test positive for drugs when they are no longer under the influence, a person could use drugs, be under their effects, and yet have the drugs moved through their system in such a way that they would not test positive.
While this can be frustrating, the good news is that there are ways for police to test a person to see if they are impaired. After all, the real concern is not whether or not they have done drugs but whether or not their driving is impaired.
