“Drivers who take medicinal cannabis for cancer or mental health or pain relief, are not willing to put themselves in a position where they are potentially going to be prosecuted for driving while taking a medication that is prescribed,” she said.
"These people are often very conscious of not driving when they feel impaired by their substance but the legislation as it stands, it doesn’t matter if you are impaired or not, it’s only if the substance is in your system.
The key issue is they are testing for the presence of THC which can remain in the body a long time, long after it would have no effect on driving. If they cannot detect impairment, what’s the point? Now nobody with a legal medical cannabis prescription can drive without fear of being tested.
I’m curious to hear views from others on this. This article claims both that medical users are careful not to drive under the influence, then later claims they may drive under the influence of something else so as to avoid being caught.
Personally 50k a year seems like such a low number it’s barely a pilot (there were 3 million breath tests in 2023).
From Schedule 5 of the legislation:
- 3 ng/ml is the “high-risk blood concentration level” for THC.
- 1 ng/ml is the “tolerance blood concentration level” for THC.
What is the difference?
Medsafe says:
Schedule 5 has two blood concentration levels for each listed qualifying drug: tolerance and high-risk.
Exceeding the lower level (tolerance) is an infringement and could result in a fine or licence demerit points.
Exceeding the higher level (high-risk) could result in a criminal charge and the driver may be disqualified from driving or sentenced to prison.
To get an idea of what other countries are doing see https://www.ncids.org/2021/marijuana-impairment-faq/
How long can THC be detected in the blood after ingestion of marijuana?
“Low THC levels of a few nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) in blood can result from relatively recent use (e.g., smoking within 1 – 3 hours) when some slight or even moderate impairment is likely to be present, or it can result from chronic use where no recent ingestion has occurred and no impairment is present.” - Compton at p. 7.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to be on the road with a bunch of stoned people but it seems pretty bleak to me. A medical user could definitely hit 1ng/ml without being impaired.
There is another RNZ story on this from 11 Oct.
Thanks for this! I read through a bunch of your link and had many of my questions answered. It seems pretty clear that people want a way to test similar to breath testing so some government made one up, despite marijuana impairment not being correlated to blood levels in the same way.
Was this legislation introduced by the previous government? Did it go through the select committee process?
You’re right. They were looking for something like breath testing for alcohol. You can see that in the bill history.
On legislation.govt.nz, you can see the legislative history under the “View whole” tab.
Legislative history
- 30 July 2020: Introduction (Bill 317–1)
- 4 August 2020: First reading and referral to Transport and Infrastructure Committee
- 17 June 2021: Reported from Transport and Infrastructure Committee (Bill 317–2)
- 11 August 2021: Second reading
- 16 February 2022: Committee of the whole House (Bill 317–3)
- 8 March 2022: Third reading
- 11 March 2022: Royal assent
If you go back through all the versions and amendments, you can see they originally tried to introduce a saliva test. The transport minister then recommended blood tests. One could speculate that was due to research and submissions.
Committee of the Whole House included amendments to use saliva only as an indicator of use, while relying on blood tests to measure levels. This enables officers to administer compulsory road-side oral swabs as a precursor to taking someone in for a blood test.
Section 71A “Who must undergo first oral fluid test”, which includes “a driver of, or a person attempting to drive, a motor vehicle on a road”. This enables random roadside testing without a specific reason. This was acknowledged as a violation of NZBORA which was deemed in the public interest by the Land Transport Act 1998.
So, if you drive a car in any mental state, get ready for the cops to stick stuff in your mouth.
Yeah, based on the link in your first comment the answer is that there is basically no way to test impairment without just giving people impairment tests. So even though we may have moved to this because saliva tests are a bit dodgy, it’s probably not much better.
Honestly, I think we should just throw loads more money into getting self-driving cars sorted. Well, I guess there is already loads of money being thrown at it so we should wait it out. Then we can just ban driving and solve the whole problem.
