BONOKOSKI: Trudeau Liberals don’t know what's one toke over the line
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The proverbial horse, its swayed back loaded down with soon-to-be legal marijuana, is already out of the barn and yet the Trudeau Liberals are just now funding a study to determine how blitzed one can be behind the wheel before the cuffs come out.
Was this not something that should have been front-and-centre the moment Justin Trudeau became prime minister, riding high on his promise to legalize weed, and not commissioned just this week, a few months before recreational pot becomes lawful nationwide?
A
press release Tuesday from Public Safety Canada, the home turf of Ralph Goodale, led off with the fact that drug-impaired driving has been on the rise since police-reported data became available in 2009, and is now a “major contributor to fatal road crashes in Canada.”
And this increase comes before anyone has actually taken a legal toke. Imagine the carnage on the roads come Oct. 17, the official day reefer freedom is unleashed on a vulnerable public.
The price of stock in funeral homes should skyrocket.
Tow-truck firms, too, will also be seen as wise investments.
Remember, you read it here first. Remember, for example, the riches ahead if one had only listened to the investment advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s character in Mike Nichols’ 1967 classic,
The Graduate.
“I just want to say one word to you. One word,” said Mr. McGuire, the neighbour of young Benjamin Braddock. “Plastics.”
Your world would have been awash in $-signs.
But that was then. Two days ago, Ralph Goodale, Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, used his office to announce almost $1 million — or, more precisely, $919,065 — will be invested in Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) over a three-year period to “help advance scientific knowledge on the impact of cannabis on drivers ranging in age from 19 to 45.”
Don’t bother looking for that horse. It’s long gone.
But now you know who among the doper demographic the cops will be profiling and targeting — the first legal teens to the pre-geezers.
Their search of the drug impaired will be aided, of course, by a new law giving them carte blanche to stop anyone without cause.
Outrage over this, however, has yet to kick in.
Goodale’s study will use “simulated driving” to determine how increased levels of THC in blood and oral fluid — here, piss in this vial — can impact a driver, including his or her ability to anticipate hazards, the level of risk-taking behaviour, reaction time and the position and speed on the road.
It sounds like fun, does it not?
There is still no equivalent for pot like the existence of the court-approved breathalyzer for booze, so it will come down to police performing Standard Field Sobriety Testing and Drug Recognition Expert Evaluation.
In other words, can you walk a straight line, touch your nose, and do the pupils of your eyes look larger and a little wonky?
This is hardly court-worthy, not when there is no roadside tokealyzer to take reasonable doubt out of play.
Dr. Bruna Brands, a research scientist with CAMH, as well as a toxicologist, put it this way: “While we have known for a long time that cannabis affects our ability to drive, more in-depth and targeted knowledge is necessary to set limits for blood concentrations of THC.
“This research will enable us to set such limits, comparable to those which we set for alcohol several decades ago.”
In other words, the recreational use of marijuana will be legal before anyone really knows who is legally wrecked and who isn’t.
Who wins? Lawyers, of course.
This is hardly surprising.
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