Unlike alcohol, which allows police officers to easily detect the amount of the substance in a driver’s system, marijuana poses all sorts of testing issues for state officials.
First, THC, the psychoactive agent in marijuana, stays in a person’s body for weeks after the initial high has long since worn off. And, today, scientists do not have a reliable test to determine exactly how much marijuana is in a person’s system at any given point of time.
However, scientists across the country are working on developing a saliva test to determine whether a driver is impaired by marijuana, as several states look to push more aggressive marijuana marijuana DUI laws , according to a report from Reuters.
Sources indicate that scientists at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a relatively obscure government research lab, have been developing a simple saliva test that will be able to detect whether a driver has recently been using marijuana.
The test, though, won’t be able to specifically measure the user’s level of marijuana use. In fact, according to the so-called White House drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, “I’ll be dead – and so will lots of other people – from old age, before we know the impairment levels.”
So, scientists are creating an admittedly less-than-reliable saliva test to gauge whether a person who is driving after smoking marijuana is too impaired to get behind the wheel.
And the unreliability of the saliva test has many DUI attorneys concerned that their clients could be hauled before a judge for DUI violations due to drug use that occurred days, or perhaps weeks, before the incident in question.
In response, law enforcement officials say that there are other gauges to determine just how stoned a driver is, including the redness of eyes, coordination, speech, and the like. But this seems to add a lot of guess work to an arrest that could lead to jail time or serious fines.
In fact, these concerns have already been addressed by a wary public. In California, for example, Proposition 19, which would have elevated marijuana to the status of alcohol in DUI arrests, failed in 2010 in part because voters were concerned that it didn’t specifically set forth a THC driving limit.
In the voters’ minds, if blood alcohol levels are capped at .08 percent, then THC levels should have an equally concrete limit for drivers. This limit, however, may be impossible to adequately set, given today’s current marijuana-detecting technology.
