Justice committee  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 m

Justice committee  It's a good question, sir. We base our general deterrence model and drug testing regime on that of alcohol. Unfortunately, it's taken 40 years for our community to really understand and find drinking and driving quite repugnant. It's socially unacceptable here, so few people now

Justice committee  We are trying to look at technology now that will streamline our drug testing to mirror drink testing. We would like devices that will do both. At the moment, they're completely separate activities. The legislation is completely separate. I mentioned before that my police force

Justice committee  We run our internal courses. All of our members have gone through a one-day training course. It's a very basic saliva test: swab the tongue, leave it flat for six minutes, and the bars will come up. It's very similar to a pregnancy test. Depending on what drugs.... We test for me

Justice committee  That's correct.

Justice committee  No, that's 2% who plead not guilty, not because they are challenging the test. They have a right to plead not guilty, for a variety of reasons. It's not to do with the accuracy of the testing. They've just invoked their right to have the matter heard at court. The benefit we have

Justice committee  No, they calibrate it to detect.... Our legislation has allowed us, and it's tried and tested at the higher courts.... If there is any detectable level of illicit drugs, whether it be amphetamine or cannabis, our legislation advises that there is impairment in that driving.

Justice committee  Mr. Cannings, I think the challenge is to get into the hearts and minds of the community, to convince the people that if they choose to use cannabis they should separate this behaviour from driving. I suppose we have the luxury of not having to prove impairment at all. If we det

Justice committee  These were absolutely randomized. Under my command, we have drug and alcohol buses. These are very large buses that we put on freeways and put everyone through the bus. The whole freeway will be blocked and we'll filter people through. This is for general deterrence and a good re

Justice committee  With our buses we do anywhere from 3 million to 4.5 million tests a year. On the buses, our strike rate for alcohol is one in 370. For drugs it's one in 44. We have 10 police on a highway testing people as they come through, but our highway patrol has a lower strike rate when it

Justice committee  Not everyone, because it's too cost prohibitive. They will select people coming through the line, but they'll be tested for both drugs and alcohol. It's not every person who comes through. The buses do 50,000 drug tests, and the other 50,000 are done by the single-officer patro

Justice committee  The first one I showed you, the blue one, is what we call the POFT, the preliminary oral fluid test. That is what we do a 100,000 times. If they then test positive to that, they do the OFT, the oral fluid test, the red one, which is our evidentiary test. It is that one that we th

Justice committee  Yes.

Justice committee  We're comfortable that we don't have the false positives. What has been occurring, and it still occurs.... This is the oral fluid test, the evidentiary test that we then send off to our lab. Of these, about 2% come back as not sufficient sample to be tested. It's about 2% that

Justice committee  Our testing regime is supposed to be—and it's hard to educate our members not to do this—a general deterrence model. If they see someone they believe is driving impaired, they are supposed to do an impaired driver test similar to your sobriety test. What many of them do is just g