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One in 5 Kiwis aged 13-17 have smoked cannabis in the prior year.
Local studies point to cannabis being faraway the most common drug behind teenagers fatal crashes.
NZ is co-leading a global trend of the momentous gains in drink drive reduction being eroded by other drug use.
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Drugs up there with alcohol as road fatality factor
A study of drivers killed in road accidents shows they were almost as likely to have drugs in their system as alcohol.
The study, commissioned by the police, analysed blood samples of more than 1000 drivers who died in road crashes between 2004 and 2009.
It found that almost half of the drivers tested positive for alcohol, drugs or a combination of the two; 35% had alcohol in their blood and 34% showed evidence of recent drug use, mainly cannabis.
The road safety lobby group Candor says the study shows New Zealand is ignoring half of the road safety problem.
"Shame on our outdated and decrepit approach to road safety," says Candor spokesperson Rachael Ford, who says police should be randomly testing for drugs as well as alcohol.
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Drugged driving fatalities outnumber drink driving deaths
More fatal road crashes last year involved drugged drivers than drunk drivers, figures obtained by the Automobile Association (AA) reveal.
Road crashes imposed intangible, financial and economic costs to society, said the report. Photo: 123RF
Last year, 79 fatal crashes involved a driver with drugs in their system, compared with 70 involving an intoxicated driver.
In 2016, 59 fatal crashes involved a drugged driver and 67 involved alcohol. The figures come from testing that is done by authorities following a fatal crash.
"The AA has called drugged driving a silent killer on our roads for years and these latest figures confirm how prevalent drugs are in fatal crashes," Dylan Thomsen, AA road safety spokesperson, said.
"No one wants someone who is high driving towards their family at 100km/h but right now the chances of being caught drugged driving is tiny. We have to change that."
The association is repeating its call for the introduction of random roadside drugs testing.
Excluding alcohol, the two most commonly detected individual drugs were cannabis and P.
The cases of P being detected had shot up in recent years, and a range of other drugs and medications that impair driving also feature in the results, the AA said. Morning Report
Dylan Thomsen said saliva-based testing kits should be used. They detect common illicit drugs including cannabis, methamphetamine, and ecstasy.
At present police have to have strong cause to suspect drug use and then take the driver to a police station for a 'walk-and-turn' test.
"The current system almost needs a driver to be sitting in the car with drugs on the seat next to them to get tested," Mr Thomsen said.
"The saliva testing devices being used in many other countries would be much faster and allow many more potentially drug impaired drivers to be tested than the current approach."
The AA believes the increase in drugged-driving figures this year is probably due to more thorough testing being done following crashes.
Drug tests ineffective - Drug Foundation
The Drug Foundation questions the validity of the tests and does not believe the technology is currently at a standard for it to be introduced in New Zealand.
"It doesn't test for the full range of drugs, including prescription medications that it needs to. It doesn't test for impairment and in the case of cannabis, overseas studies have shown that it misses about half of the cases," executive director Ross Bell said.
He said it should not be relied on as solid evidence for police enforcement.
Students Against Dangerous Driving (SADD) national manager Donna Govorko said the organisation was working to educate young people about their role in stopping dangerous driving.
"We encourage all young people to ... have their say and speak up.
"Because they're also influential on the driver."
Ms Govorko said the current drug testing system was quite limited and she would like to see a more scientific and robust approach taken.
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Stop delaying saliva tests for drugged drivers, and we can save hundreds of lives
GRANT MATTHEW/STUFF
Emergency services at the scene of a 2018 crash in Waverley, south Taranaki, in which a drugged driver killed seven people, including himself.
OPINION: One day the court sentenced a known addict to traffic school for a drugged-up three-car writeoff. He killed my mum 40 days later.
The circumstances of Mary Radley's horrific ending represent a typical scenario, seen perhaps weekly: it occurred following many drug crashes that were misprocessed as "careless driving".
The epidemic led to me establishing Candor Network to drive change. Later my psychopharmacology qualifications saw me become a court-recognised drug-driving expert.
Cannabis swings elections, as Helen Clark once pronounced influentially. Every party historically treads carefully to avoid cannabis users' eviscerating wrath (I get death threats).
READ MORE:
* The science of roadside drug testing
* Alison Mau: How are we going to tackle drug driving?
* Drug-impaired drivers in more fatal crashes than drinkers
* The science of roadside drug testing
* Alison Mau: How are we going to tackle drug driving?
* Drug-impaired drivers in more fatal crashes than drinkers
Green Party politicians go further in diligently playing down the risk on our roads from cannabis smoking, but recent use suggests a danger level matching that of alcohol. Just three nanograms (ng) of cannabis in blood, where New Zealand deaths mostly cluster, imparts 7.4 times the risk.
SUPPLIED
Mary Radley, an HIV specialist nurse at Christchurch Hospital, was killed in a car crash in Marlborough in August 2004. The crash was blamed on a methodone-using driver.
Both dead cannabis drivers and dead drunks have a doubled risk of death by speeding – the notion that people drive more slowly under the influence of cannabis is a myth.
There is no education about the specific risks for young smokers who kill others on the roads. Today there is stasis by politicians towards victim-run campaigns. They merely instituted roadside "stand on leg" tests in 2009's Land Transport Amendment Act No 4, when most other nations were introducing saliva tests that detect subtler impairment.
ESR reported in 2010 that New Zealand has the highest proportion of cannabis drivers, and high fatalities, but the government chose to stop cannabis testing of hospitalised drivers, effectively concealing offences.
This undercut the bargaining power of safety lobbyists, who are now coming up against a Green Party minister at the helm of the Government's road safety policy. The Greens are galvanised by the notion that failing a saliva test does not establish cannabis impairment.
This might reflect American-born minister Julie Anne Genter's blinkered view of what constitutes impairment. North American legislatures labour slavishly at forcing drug-driving into the drink-driving framework, seeking the kinds of impairments that alcohol causes.
JONATHAN CAMERON/STUFF
Australia combines drug and drink drive testing checkpoints. Police pull out a sample of drivers to undergo drug testing, as it takes too long to test every driver. (File photo)
But the ill-effects from drugs differ from those from alcohol, so expecting that police can always prove drug-driver "incapability" (legalese for looking grossly drunk) is misplaced.
European jurisdictions have taken a different, prosecutorial, approach, upgrading laws to include drug-impairment definitions.
I disagree with the view of Doug Beirness, from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse that there is uncertainty about how much "impairment" would rise as cannabis intake increases. Lab tests have found that, whether a joint is weak or potent, a subject's blood levels and their driving-skill deficits over the next few hours track identically.
Significant impairment lingers beyond the maximum high and peak blood levels, but the critical point is that all people who have recently smoked cannabis typically exceed a 3ng blood level for a few hours.
Crash causation is higher at 2ng. Over 3ng, steering and cognition become more than 50 per cent impaired. Despite the obvious bull's-eye being 2-3ng, Professor Max Cameron, of Melbourne's Monash University Accident Research Centre, has highlighted smokers' grizzles about the inability to assume cannabis impairment at low levels.
This is a red herring, because test detection cutoffs can be set at levels where evidence has shown an increased risk of impairment, as the European Transport Safety Commission has said.
Cameron's view that uncertainty about risk at low levels should kaibosh testing for cannabis mystifies me, since sane detection cutoffs are quite commonly married to legal limits.
European countries set limits of 2-3ng in blood, made possible by the fact that initial tests can reliably prove recent use (meaning blood exceeds 3ng). Screening tests do produce odd false positives, but results overseas are verified by follow-up oral fluid swabs that are definitive.
Since swab results correlate very well to blood levels, it's also no stretch to infer impairment from failed confirmatory tests.
This is fantastic technology, given that the WHO predicts an annual death toll of 8000 cannabis-impaired drivers across the world by 2030.
Scarily, half the drunk drivers that police nab have used cannabis, multiplying their crash risk 100-fold. The perils of mixing alcohol and cannabis explain why the deterrent effect of saliva tests didn't just halve Germany's drug toll, but also why it became a leading EU country for reducing drink-driving as a factor in road deaths. Victoria, in Australia, also experienced a double whammy of success.
Adopting saliva technology could prevent 300 deaths over five years in New Zealand, though this projection doesn't account for the referendum leading to full cannabis legalisation.
While Genter may want cars vaporised and smokers vaporising, turning a blind eye to drug users killing themselves and others like skittles is not on.
Random saliva tests (which ought also to target bad drivers) are fully workable. But a compromise of excluding cannabis from saliva tests would decimate effectiveness.
Time will tell if this Government can show more spine about protecting Kiwis than its predecessors.
* Rachael Ford set up Candor Network (Campaign Against Drugs On Roads).
The Dominion Post
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"Drugged and Drunk Driving"
Read more at .....
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THE EFFECT OF CANNABIS COMPARED WITH ALCOHOL ON DRIVING
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THE EFFECT OF CANNABIS COMPARED WITH ALCOHOL ON DRIVING
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