Thank you, Mr. Rankin. That's a lot to unpack.
I would say to you that I think the United States and Canada, in terms of impaired driving training, operate fairly parallel. For a police officer who is going through a basic training program to become a police officer will typically receive a 24-hour training in the standardized field sobriety tests. They are the three tests that are employed as basic alcohol impairment detection methods: horizontal gaze, nystagmus, walk and turn, one-leg stand. That's the standard basis, and your average patrol officer will have that training.
Within the last 10 years a new training has been developed. Its acronym is ARIDE. It's a 16-hour training that is a bridge training between the basic program and the much more advanced drug recognition expert program. Typically, it helps law enforcement officers identify seven different categories of drugs. Those seven categories are largely taken from the drug recognition expert program which, of course, is the most advanced training.
Drug recognition experts are very good at what they do. They are typically a very small percentage of the entire police force. They're good at what they do, but there aren't that many of them, in part because their curriculum is incredibly challenging. It's very difficult not only to become a DRE but to maintain your DRE status. There are different levels of police officers. Can you have a police officer who is trained in the basic SFSTs identify a marijuana-impaired driver? Yes, you can, but there are also degrees of impairment.
When I run my green lab classes, we have people who put on varying degrees of impairment. The difficult thing with marijuana impairment is that a lot of the deficits are mental, not physical. I'm guessing most of us can sit here and imagine how drunks present themselves. They'll have a lot of physical manifestations of that. The panel can ask themselves, what does a high person look like? I suppose if you've seen one you could try to put it into words, but I pose this question to my police officers all over the country and they struggle with it. Proving marijuana cases is often proving mental impairment, and that's a much taller task.