Greens MP David Shoebridge is getting pretty sick of the government’s bulllllshit, particular their lack of scientific reasoning with RBT drug testing.
Why? Because the NSW State Government claims that cracking down on drivers with RBT drug testing is about safety, and caring for the public welfare.
So Shoebridge would like to know, why doesn’t the government care about actual impairment?
When police conduct RBT testing for alcohol, they find your blood-alcohol level, right? This tells them approximately how wankered you are – they gauge the level of your impairment.
But with drugs, this does not exist. They simply test whether you have cannabis, MDMA or amphetamines in your system – even if you are no longer impaired by them.
So, if you smoked somethin’ or took somethin’ recently, and it’s still in your system, you can lose your drivers license – even if you’re no longer impaired. Like, imagine losing your license because you had a few beers yesterday arvo.
He also takes issue with the fact that testing only happens for those three types of illegal drugs, and doesn’t test for legal or prescription drugs that can also easily impair you while operating a car.
Shoebridge has created a petition about this, and asks for NSW Police to better educate themselves and improve their testing procedures, much like the UK Government has. He also asks for police to do this before their plans to triple their amount of RBT testing.
He said this to us about the petition:
“The Greens support evidenced-based policing that detects and punishes drug impaired drivers on the road, but that’s not what we have in NSW. The Coalition government continues to fudge the figures and invest limited police resources in a programme that is arbitrary, unreliable and invasive.The fundamental problem with the police roadside drug testing is that it has nothing to do with removing drug impaired drivers from the road. Testing for minute traces of just three illegal drugs at levels well below those that impair drivers is all about ideology and nothing to do with road safety.”
If you’d like to read more, or sign the petition, you can here: change.org/p/nsw-police-force-minister-for-police-stop-evidence-free-roadside-drug-testing#petition-letter
Source: Change.org.
Photo: QLD Police.
