At the moment in Australia, there's no push to legalize marijuana. There is beginning to be a push for it to be used for medical purposes. In that respect, the Australian situation is quite different. Indeed, as you may be aware, as early as 2003, the Australian states started introducing random roadside drug testing. We have it for three specified drugs: cannabis, methamphetamine, and MDMA—ecstasy. I know one of my Australian colleagues will be telling you more about that later.
A point I'd like to make about that is that I think there was strong support for that at the time in the community. It was not necessarily controversial partly because at the time the legalization of marijuana wasn't something being considered. The Australian experience is that there's growing concern about the use of cannabis and its effect on driving. That's what underpinned the introduction of random roadside drug testing.
A point, though, that I would like to make is that, as we introduced random roadside drug testing, that meant that police resources were being used for that purpose as well as for testing for alcohol. I think sometimes there's been a tendency to think that we can take resources from drink driving enforcement, in other words from random breath testing, and devote them to random roadside drug testing.
Whilst I am not at all expressing a concern about random drug testing per se, the point I want to make is that, if you go down the track of some form of increased drug testing, it's important that you don't sacrifice breath testing for alcohol as a result of that.
If I look at the literature, from what I've seen, the highest crash risk is still being shown for the use of alcohol. Whilst there's also an increased crash risk for drugs, when it's most pronounced is when it's being used in conjunction with alcohol. From a road safety point of view, I'd be arguing that a very high priority is increasing the amount of breath testing in order to reduce alcohol-related crashes. If you go down the track of introducing some form of drug testing, that shouldn't in any way detract or cause some compromise of the amount of breath testing that is performed.
The Australian experience is that, if you can achieve high levels of random breath testing, it produces results in terms of reducing alcohol-related fatalities.