If Immediate Roadside Prohibitions are a great thing, why did it take so long before they were introduced? And why don’t they have them anywhere else? And how is it that BC, a jurisdiction without any noteworthy history of innovation in breath testing technology, came to suddenly know something others don’t without any studies to back it up? Oh, and what is it that allowed this revolutionary change despite using the same breath testers for over a decade?
These are all good questions. The answers should cause you to shudder.
Science doesn’t support roadside DUI prohibitions
The first thing you need to know is that the science doesn’t support roadside DUI prohibitions such as IRPs.
The BC government when developing the IRP scheme conducted no studies and sought no input from the forensic scientists who study this stuff. We asked one of the RCMP scientists about their role in the scheme and we were told that “nobody talked to them about it” before the IRP scheme was introduced. One would think their opinion would have been sought and more importantly that they would be tasked with conducting studies to determine, for example, the impact of the internal ASD temperature increasing rapidly, or the effect of moisture in the electrical connections on roadside breathalyzers, or how many times a mouthpiece can be inserted at low temperatures before the neoprene hose degrades and fails.
We can think of a few hundred other studies they should have conducted. Probably they wouldn’t want to know the results.
What happens when an ASD is handled roughly? What happens when it is regularly dropped while in its case from 50 cm to the back seat of a police cruiser. What if it’s dropped on the bottom edge of the case? What if it’s dropped flat?
What happens if the ASD temperature sensor is warmer than the fuel cell which actually tests the breath sample?
What happens if someone blows a really large amount of mouth alcohol through the ASD? Some documents say it will damage the fuel cell. How much alcohol is necessary to damage a fuel cell?
We had one case where it was clear that the police had to recalibrate the ASD only days after it had been tested and calibrated. It appeared to be a chronic problem with the particular device. TheRoadSafetyBC adjudicator rejected our concerns saying it was probably affected by a change in altitude. They upheld the prohibition.
Has anyone ever studied how a change in altitude could affect an Alco-Sensor IV calibration?
No. It was pure speculation on behalf of the adjudicator. There is no science here; just the conjecture of the adjudicator.
If indeed a change in altitude does affect calibration of ASDs, what happens when an officer with an ASD calibrated in Hope then puts it in her trunk and drives to Merritt?
We could go on. The point is, when the Government decided to elevate screeners to the role of deciding the fate of BC drivers, they did so without turning their minds to these important concerns. They conducted no studies. They did no research into these issues. They simply relied on some police officers to tell them that it was all okay. Had they actually spent 5 minutes doing their jobs, our elected officials would have determine that science doesn’t support roadside DUI prohibitions
What is the state of the breathalyzer science?
There have been no published studies using the Alco-Sensor IV DWF, which is the roadside breathalyzer we use in BC. There are no studies comparing it with blood tests taken reasonably contemporaneously. One problem that makes it impossible to assess the accuracy of the DWF devices we use in BC is that the units don’t give a numerical reading you could use to compare. To do such a study you would need to know what alcohol level the device detected. In BC these breathalyzers merely register Warn or Fail if the reading is in an unlawful range. So they can’t even do a comparison study.
What about other studies? Two old studies from the U.S. Using more sophisticated devices with much more stringent testing showed a fairly reliable correlation between breath alcohol as tested on those particular devices and blood alcohol.
The studies are based on a system so different from what we have in BC that they’re fairly useless as a comparison. But it’s the closest thing out there in support of the Government’s position.
A more recently a study was conducted in Northern Europe by the world’s top scientists in the alcohol toxicology field. They concluded that there are significant unexplained instances of roadside breath testers providing very different results from near contemporaneous blood tests.
We were in contact with one of the authors of the study. He told us that this is one of the reasons the scientific community does not support the use of such roadside breathalyzers for punishment. Simply put, science doesn’t support roadside DUI prohibitions.
Postscript: Responsible Government isn’t always responsible
In Canada we have the concept of responsible government, i.e. the government can lose power in an election so they are responsible to the electorate. What happens when governments make irresponsible decisions? Not much apparently.
In making the switch to relying on roadside DUI breathalyzers to punish people without first studying whether relying on these devices for this purpose was appropriate, our Government acted irresponsibly. But they won’t be held accountable by the electorate. Alleged drunk drivers are our modern pariahs. Any law, even awful laws, will get the support of the majority of the public if the public are told that the law comes down hard on drunk drivers.
Such is the state of things.