The Future of Road Safety in the UK

Most of the working population will have used some mode of transport to get to work today, and most will be unaware of how many people around them are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, making them a potential danger to themselves and the public.

Around 6% of the working population tested positive for drugs or alcohol in figures detailed in a recent white paper. This figure is solely from companies who currently have a policy in place and test for the presence of drugs or alcohol. Does this make you question what the real figure is...?

Certain industries have an even higher average rate of substance misuse. The transport and logistics industry is one of these, with a current positivity rate of 8.3%. History shows that in sectors where random testing is mandatory, such as the rail industry, these figures are substantially lower at around 3%. What is the company that you work for or use for work travel doing to manage this risk?

Drink Driving
The UK’s most common problem is alcohol misuse. This costs England alone £21 billion annually in healthcare, crime and productivity costs, according to figures published by Alcohol Concern. An estimated 9990 casualties of drink-driving accidents were reported in the UK in 2011, including 280 fatalities and 1290 seriously injured. Alcohol Concern also estimates at least 17million work days are lost due to alcohol related “sickies”!

Alcohol stays in your system for on average one hour per unit. This is by no means an exact science and will vary greatly from person to person. It is however estimated that your liver can remove between 15 and 25mg per 100ml, or 0.015–0.025%. This result is equivalent to a breath alcohol decrease between 6 and 11 µg per 100ml or 0.06 and 0.11 mg/l breath alcohol. So if you drink 4 pints of average strength beer or 2 glasses of wine one evening, finishing drinking at 10pm, you may still be unable to drive legally until after 8am the following morning! I know many of us will have gotten into a car the morning after the night before feeling less than 100%!

The only way you can ensure your drivers are sober is by screening them before they start work. This is fine if they all come into a central depot before getting into their vehicle, but what if they are based from home as many sales people, long distance truck drivers and managers are? How can you ensure they are safe to drive before they get behind the wheel? Fitting an Alcolock® to their vehicle is by far the most effective and efficient way. The Alcolock® GB Breathalyser Immoboliser System is not just a breathalyser, it is a tethered alcohol device which is connected directly to a vehicle immobiliser. The Alcolock® is designed to prevent any driver from starting the vehicle if a breath sample is over a preset alcohol limit. In the event of the Alcolock® detecting an excessive alcohol reading, the vehicle will become immobilised. If the sample is under the limit the vehicle will start as normal.  On the continent the use of these devices is commonplace, for example in France where fitting such an immobiliser is a mandatory requirement for all school buses. In Sweden the drink drive limit is far lower than in the UK, and people either fit devices themselves or purchase “personal use” breathalysers to ensure they are safe to drive.

Currently the UK has one of the highest drink drive limits in Europe, at 80mg per 100ml in blood, 0.35µg in breath. Much of Europe is lower at 50mg and 0.22µg respectively. Some professional drivers have a much lower limit at 8mg. Looking at some figures, in the UK we carry out on average 700,000–800,000 breath alcohol tests each year. In France, a country with a very similar population but arguably a more difficult geographical area to police, the annual figure is nearly 10 million tests. Makes you wonder whether we are serious about having safe roads to drive on in the UK...

Drug Driving
If we look at drug driving the facts are less clear due to a previous lack of legislation or testing methods. Lillian’s Law was announced in the 2011 Queen’s Speech and there is now an active push towards getting devices for police use at the roadside. Some countries have had devices in place for years and use strategic road blocks. Recent statistics from South Australia show that since the start of their roadside drug testing operation in 2006, when all police traffic officers were trained to use oral fluid testing devices that can be used anytime there is suspicion of impairment, they have drug-screened more than 241,000 people and 10,000 of those were found to be driving under the influence of illicit drugs. That equates to 1 in 24 people. Furthermore, in a blitz held on June 18th 2013, in the space of just 4 hours 12 people were caught drug driving. This level of drivers’ drug use is clearly shocking, and poses a huge risk to the public.

Do these figures suggest there could be more drug drivers than drunk ones on our roads? That question at the moment is impossible to answer definitively, as people are seldom stopped by the police to be “tested”, and are even more rarely convicted, plus the methods currently available for Police use neither give dependable results or are suitable, for example, to be used in busy cities. Can you imagine, as a police officer, stopping a suspected drug driver in a hectic city environment, where their erratic or unsafe driving has caused the officer to be suspicious. They then pull the car over where safe, but in such an environment where is safe? The driver may or may not cooperate in being asked to walk up and down in a straight line. Then the suspect must balance on one leg, touch their nose, close their eyes and judge the passing of time – I am sure you are already thinking, “what a palaver”. But on the other hand this is the police officer’s job, so as difficult as it may be they should still be doing it, right? Yes, right. So let’s think this through. The process may have taken 10 minutes at best, and that is if the driver was on his own and there weren’t others in the car shouting abuse at either the police officer or their friend.  As I am sure has been the case up until now, and will continue to be so in the future, the so-called “mob mentality” is alive and kicking in the UK today. The major problem with this scenario though is that no science has been used whatsoever in judging whether the driver is under the influence of drugs. So, in 21st century UK, an arrest can be made on the officer’s gut feeling and on the driver not being able to balance on one leg and touch their nose......Now, I am no solicitor, but I am starting to build the defence already!

So, back to the original question: are there more drug drivers than drunk ones on our roads? Let’s look at a few of the many countries that do test using scientific devices that are widely available in the world today. As well as South Australia, mentioned above, Poland, Italy and Germany, as well as many other European countries, all carry out roadside testing. Once again the UK is way behind the rest of the world with this issue, despite the announcement in the 2012 Queen’s Speech that a revision of drug-driving legislation would occur. In 2008 71,449 people were convicted of drink driving in England and Wales, compared to only 1644 people convicted of drug driving. However, to build a slightly clearer picture, consider the figures from the Sir Peter North Report published in March 2011, which quotes statistics from a British crime survey that claims 28,604 16–59 year olds had used illicit drugs in the past year! If we estimate that 50% of those drive, if just 25% percent of those drove whilst under the influence of the drugs they had taken that would mean 3575 people were drug driving! The report, due to its age, does not include the vast range of new so-called legal highs. What would the figures look like now? The picture that is being built suggests this problem is becoming more and more real. A drug test using an approved product takes between 2–3 minutes longer than a breath test – not long if it saves just one person being killed by someone driving under the influence of drugs.

The UK does have a law in place, but the government has not yet approved any of the devices that are used around the world on a daily basis. However, the Alere™ DDS®2 Mobile Test System is currently being used in field trials with police forces across the country, in preparation for the introduction of the new specific offence in the Drugs (Roadside Testing) Act 2011 of driving or being in charge of a motor vehicle with a concentration of a controlled drug above a specified limit. Roadside drug testing devices such as the Alere™ DDS®2 will be used as preliminary screening devices to help the police assess whether a driver’s condition might be due to the presence of drugs. We hope the introduction of roadside drug testing devices in the UK will bring a marked improvement in road safety in the UK, and that we can all look forward to driving around the country knowing that our roads are a safer place.

For more information
www.aleretoxicology.co.uk