I DOUBT I’m the only Tamworth resident who greets The NDL headline, “1 in 3 drug driving: 20 nabbed in two-day blitz” with healthy scepticism.
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I can but suggest a few possibilities for this apparent statistical aberration.
For starters, 62 isn’t a statistically big sample size, and that only 62 drivers were tested in a two-day blitz targeting several streets suggests the police weren’t completely random in their testing regime, but were drawing on intelligence gathered from previous drug testing and even the outcomes of court appearances.
It’s likely they also looked for behavioural and other indicators before subjecting a driver to the swab.
Finally, there’s the fact that not every positive swab later turns out to be someone actually driving under the influence.
People can return positive swabs for cannabis a few days after they last imbibed it and a urine test can return a positive result a month or more later.
Amphetamines dissipate quickly in the body, often leaving no trace 24 hours later, and again, a swab test doesn’t quantify the level of impairment in the driver, just that he’s used it recently.
In my own statistically small sample of friends and colleagues, none to my knowledge are drug drivers.
But then, I don’t go around randomly testing them, either.
John Dunlop
Tamworth