'Drug-driving' on the rise, but police have no answer

HYDERABAD/DELHI: The two joints of hash Binay Singh had with his friends at his Greater Kailash house in Delhi last Saturday seemed especially potent to him. It was late by the time the party broke and Binay (not his real name) had to drop one of his friends to Gurugram. Midway, he slowed his car to almost 30 km/hour, the high from the hashish getting to him. At a police checkpoint near Chanakyapuri, cops stopped him.

“I was scared,” Binay later said. “They asked me why I was driving so slow. I told them I was feeling unwell. They sniffed and couldn’t smell alcohol. They let me go but it was a close shave.”

It took a long time for police in Indian cities to get the mechanism to catch drunk drivers. Now, as driving under the influence of illegal and prescription drugs rises, police find themselves behind on the tech curve again, with no mechanism in place to catch drug users at the wheel.


“Cannabis, LSD, MDMA or Ecstasy, hashish and cocaine are among the drugs being seized. But the only way to detect narcotics in a driver is through a blood sample. We can only book someone if found in possession of drugs, or buying it or in the act of consuming it,” said K Pavan Kumar, assistant excise superintendent, enforcement wing of Telangana prohibition and excise department.

Cops now rely on smell, sight & instinct
Drugs can severely impact a user’s perceptual and motor skills, delaying reaction and information processing time, say experts. It can be a deadly problem if the user isdriving. Road safety experts said that even legal drugs prescribed by doctors to treat common medical conditions affect the performance of the driver.

“Amphetamines or stimulants used to treat hyperactivity or obesity impact a driver’s motor performance. According to the World Health Organisation, the risk of a fatal crash among those who have used amphetamines is five times higher than among nonusers,” said Vinod K Kanumala, CEO of Indian Federation of Road Safety.

Till June this year, Delhi police caught 1.5 lakh drunk drivers. Drug users, though, are a different matter.

“We can detect drug-using drivers visually, or through smell. If they are caught, they can be booked under the Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act,” said Alok Kumar, joint commissioner of police (traffic), Delhi.

Without technology, police can do very little to catch drug users during checks. “Currently, we can only seek a test of narcotics content in the system of a person if he is involved in an accident,” said Anil Kumar, additional commissioner of police (traffic), Hyderabad.

“On suspicion, we can send a motorist for a blood test. If substances are found in his system, he can be charged,” said a traffic police officer in Mumbai. However, such cases are rarely found during checking and Mumbai police’s traffic department does not maintain any data on driving under influence of drugs. The window of time to detect the drug while driving is very small, officers said.

The problem is not existing laws, which specify tough action against users. Additional director-general of Punjab Police Harpreet Singh Sidhu, special principal secretary to the chief minister and earlier head of the anti-drug STF, said, “A drug user can be booked under section 27 of NDPS Act, and can be imprisoned for a year.”Punjab ADGP (traffic) Sharad Satya Chauhan said, “It might be difficult to assess if a driver has taken drugs, but police personnel can easily make out a user from his physical appearance. In addition to NDPS sections, we can also invoke section 279 (rash and negligent driving) of the IPC.”

In a measure which could show other states the way forward, catching drivers on drugs might become easier with Telangana’s new road safety bill.

(With inputs from Somreet Bhattacharya in New Delhi, Sanjeev Verma and Pawan Tiwari in Chandigarh and Nitasha Natu in Mumbai)