Thank you, and thank you for the opportunity to address the standing committee, and hello from way down at the bottom of Australia.
My name is Doug Fryer. I'm the assistant commissioner of road policing in my state. Just to paint the landscape, Victoria has a population of six million, and we have a driving population of four and a half million people who either ride or drive. My role as the head of practice for road policing is to guard the state around all activities of law enforcement. Our police force is quite large. We have about 19,000 police for our state, and my command of just road policing is about 1,100 highway patrol professionals.
Relevant to your standing committee, I suppose you have activity around both drink and drug driving. To lay the landscape, Victoria, Australia, was the first in the world to bring in randomized drink driving testing in 1976. In 1976 we had about 950 people die on our roads. The population was then three million. Close to 450 of those who died had in excess of .05 in their system for alcohol, and that is our legal limit right across Australia. In contrast 40 years on, last year we had 291 die on our roads, and we had 26 people who had in excess of .05.
In 2007 again Victoria was leading the world in studying randomized drug testing. Unlike, I believe, both the United States and Canada, we practise a general deterrence model in both drink and drug driving. We aim every year to test 4.5 million people for alcohol on the side of the road. We do very general deterrence. We block roads and put everyone through drink driving testing, but our drug testing regime, again, is leading our nation with 100,000 randomized drug tests of drivers or riders every year.
What concerns us, whilst I mentioned that 26 people died in excess of .05 last year, was that we had 57 who died with illicit drugs in their system, and there were a further seven who had both drugs and alcohol.
Relevant to your committee in relation to cannabis, last year we tested 100,000 people. We used a roadside saliva test 100,000 times. That's the style. It takes just a swipe of the tongue, and within six minutes we get a result. Of the 100,000 tests we did, we had 9,200 then move to the evidentiary test, so 9,200 people out of 100,000 tested positive for illicit drugs at a strike rate of one in 11, which really concerns us.
The idea of a general deterrence model with the preliminary oral fluid test is not around impairment. If we see drivers we believe to be impaired by either drugs or alcohol, my members are supposed to do what you would call a roadside sobriety test, and if they fail the sobriety test, we then take blood from them. The method we used for the 100,000 tests is around general deterrence, and it's off the back of our learnings from our drink driving general deterrence.
Of the 9,200 that were positive last year, about 73% were with methamphetamine, and the rest were with cannabis. We have zero tolerance. I know there was discussion around the five-nanogram level. Our threshold is that if we can detect it—and this has been tried and tested in our courts since 2007—then there is impairment. As Dr. Marcotte advised, the level of impairment we see for any detectable level is equivalent to that of about .1 for alcohol and doubles the chance of having a crash. For me, it's about separating the behaviours of using any type of illicit drug and driving. It's not the moral debate of whether they should use it or not. It's around separating the behaviours of getting behind a wheel, and really the human rights of other road users who have a right to be safe from those who may choose to use drugs and then drive.
I was over in Banff only last month at an international road policing conference and I presented on this there. Some of the road policing models in both Canada and America are very different to ours because we have the luxury of a general deterrent model. As I've said, we test 4.5 million people just in Victoria for alcohol, and we have 4.5 million people who are licensed, so we aim for one test per year per driver.
I'm happy to take any questions or I could keep talking, if you like, but perhaps your questions may be more relevant.