Vermont’s drugged-driving law is difficult to enforce and should be changed, a police officer and state prosecutor told lawmakers this week.
Police need to be able to charge a person with drugged driving as easily as they can charge someone with driving drunk, law enforcement officials told the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Legislators say drugged drivers are no safer than drunk ones and agree the statute needs a tweak, but they are struggling with how to tackle the matter.
The problem is that in Vermont, there are unequal burden-of-proof standards for DUI-drugs and DUI-alcohol, which make it harder to convict someone of driving under the influence of drugs.
The House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday heard testimony on the matter from a Vermont State Police lieutenant, a state prosecutor and Bobby Sand, a policy adviser from the Department of Public Safety.
Nancy Schulz, executive director of the Vermont Bike and Pedestrian Coalition, also spoke about the danger of impaired drivers in general, describing an accident last year in which an impaired driver killed two cyclists.
The matter of drugged driving arose this session because last year’s marijuana decriminalization law called for a task force to examine drugged driving laws. That task force did not arrive at a unified recommendation.
Rep. Bill Lippert, D-Hinesburg, said he has received more than 30 emails on this topic (and also about lowering the blood alcohol content level for drunk driving in Vermont from .08 to .05).
To charge a person with DUI-alcohol in Vermont, a prosecutor must prove a person was impaired “to the slightest degree,” or that his or her blood alcohol content was .08 or greater.
To prove drug-impaired driving, however, a prosecutor must show a person was “incapable of driving safely.”
“We are more tolerant of the drug-impaired driver than we are of the alcohol-impaired driver,” Sand told the committee.
For example, he said, someone in a parked car who admitted to being high but was not driving couldn’t be convicted of DUI-drugs.
Vermont State Police Lt. John Flannigan, coordinator of the state’s Drug Recognition Experts program at DPS, said police would like the law to be changed to a uniform standard of impairment.
If a police officer pulled someone over for another reason, such as a burned-out tail light, and the person admitted to being on drugs but wasn’t driving unsafely, that person couldn’t be charged, Flannigan said.
“We’re missing a lot of cases that should be prosecuted … because of the language ‘incapable of operating safely,’” he said.
Meanwhile, police are now more skilled at identifying drugged driving, he said, and they are performing drugged driving field evaluations more frequently.
What drugs do drivers use?
Of all enforcement evaluations performed from 2005-2013, toxicology results showed that 42 percent of people were on central nervous system depressants such as sleep aids and anxiety medication, 23 percent were on marijuana and 21 percent were on narcotic painkillers, Flannigan said.
Greg Nagurney, an attorney with the Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs, also testified in support of changing the standard.
“It’s our position that the standard should just be ‘impairment,’” he told the committee.
Schulz, speaking for cyclists and walkers, said the law should be standardized because driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol is equally dangerous to cyclists and walkers.
“A uniform standard of impairment … would offer a useful tool to help law enforcement officers in their efforts to keep impaired drivers off Vermont’s roads,” she said.
In September, an impaired driver struck three bicyclists head-on along the side of Vermont 74 in Shoreham, Schulz said. A week later another driver struck three cyclists, two of whom died, she said.
Lawmakers also discussed nuances of the conundrum of drugged driving, such as what to do about the use of legitimately prescribed drugs.
The committee may use H.501, a drugged driving bill filed by Rep. Dave Potter, D-North Clarendon, to propose a change to the law.
Lippert said after the hearing that the committee needs time to discuss how to proceed responsibly. The committee has a significant load of other bills to consider before it must begin discussing Senate bills in mid-March.
