An official from the federal government recently responded to criticisms that a proposed saliva-based drug test could lead commercial truckers into using more cannabis.
Unidentified officials from Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration responded in comments published by Transit Topics to statements made by the CEO of an oral fluid drug testing company, that “truckers using cannabis can do so almost with impunity as long as the avoid drug tests for a few days.”
The contention of the CEO—Ken Fichtler, of Gaize—was that the Department of Transportation’s (DOT) “shift to oral fluid testing will have serious consequences for the trucking industry” because saliva testing has a shorter detection window than typical urine-based testing. The tests, he said, detect marijuana use in the last “24 to48 hours,” a period much shorter than that of several weeks for urine-based testing.
The DOT has finalized its new policies for oral drug tests in 2023, which allows them to be used as an alternative method to urine tests.
The SAMHSA official, granted anonymity by Transit Topics, disputed Fichtler’s claims—both on the test’s detection window itself and the implications of DOT’s revised testing policies for truckers’ marijuana use.
Official: “In the referenced journals, cannabis usage can be detected through oral fluid testing up to 72 hour,” said the official. The donor won’t know whether the sample will come from oral fluids or urine until they get to the federal agency collection center.
Fichtler described a situation where drivers stopped using marijuana a few weeks before the saliva test.
As Transit Topics reported:
The federal drug authorities say that direct observation of urine specimen collection is the best way to prevent individuals from lying about their urine samples or altering them. However, this method can only be used in some circumstances as employee privacy issues are a concern.
The oral fluid test is easier to observe without privacy issues. Some oral fluid advocates have pointed out that the test would be able to detect impairment better because it is easier to observe. The following are some recent examples of the use of Marijuana use can reduce false positives, such as in post-accident tests.
The critics of this rule complained in December that federal officials still had not set up an infrastructure allowing the use of the new testing procedures, even though it was more than six months after its finalization.
NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) had planned an event for April that would bring together government representatives, forensics and academic experts, as well industry and law enforcement officials and representatives. The NIST described the discussion in its invitation to be “a candid and open one” regarding “the future of meaningful cannabis breathalyzers technology and their implementation.”
Earlier in the month, a NIST representative told MEDCAN24 the workshop was “postponed to the summer. Date TBD”, but provided no other details.
Discussion topics at this event include the design challenges for marijuana breathalyzers, difficulties faced by prosecutors in drugged-driving prosecutions and ways NIST and others can work together to improve the technology.
Fichtler from Gaize told Transit Topics he believed the move towards saliva testing would continue. However, he added, “if the goal is to make roads safer, we need a total overhaul of our drug-testing model.”
His company has developed a technology for real-time drug testing that uses what it describes on its website as “a number of automated vision tests” to quickly detect signs of impairment due to drugs and alcohol.
In light of more than 75 percent of U.S. state’s legalizing marijuana, whether for medical use or adult usage, as well as the potential federal rescheduling, highway safety is a major concern among policymakers. Although there isn’t a widely accepted method to detect impairment in drivers during a roadside check, recent years have seen heightened efforts to deploy and develop field tests which screen for recent marijuana usage.
The trucking industry is particularly concerned about impaired driving. They are worried that marijuana’s rescheduling could cause problems with zero tolerance drug policies.
The issue of impaired driving by marijuana was raised at a recent congressional hearing. Representatives of the Governors Highway Safety Association stressed the need for roadside drug testing to prevent deadly auto accidents.
Michael Hanson said that the roadside oral fluid testing is the most important thing to prevent these tragedies. He is the Director of Traffic Safety at the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
Responding to a question from House Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Highways and Transit member Rep. Hanson also cited saliva testing, as a possible “instrument and technology” for law enforcement to use in the field.
“Putting those tools in the hands of law enforcement to prevent that from happening—or allow them to process somebody who may be impaired—is going to be important,” he told lawmakers.
The transportation industry also advised Congress in January, if marijuana is federally rescheduled, businesses want assurances that they won’t have to forgo zero-tolerance drug policies for drivers—while stressing that a key problem for the sector is a lack of technology to detect impaired driving.
Although saliva and blood tests detect marijuana usage more accurately than hair or urine samples, there is another wrinkle. A U.S. Department of Justice researcher recently admitted that it was unclear whether THC levels were a reliable indication of impairment.
Frances Scott, a physical science at the National Institute of Justice’s Office of Investigative & Forensic Science under the DOJ, questioned on a podcast the effectiveness of setting THC “per se”, driving limits. She said that there is no way, ultimately, to determine impairment from the THC level, like law enforcement does with alcohol.
Scott explained that one complication was “that if you had chronic users and infrequent users they would have different THC concentrations which correlate to different effects.” The same level of effect, if that’s what you want to call it, would be associated with very different THC concentrations in blood between chronic users and infrequent users.
Last October, a study preprint posted on The Lancet by an eight-author team representing Canada’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Health Canada and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia identified and assessed a dozen peer-reviewed studies measuring “the strength of the linear relationship between driving outcomes and blood THC” published through September 2023.
This paper concluded that “the consensus is there is no linear relation between blood THC and driving.” The paper concluded that this is a surprising result, since blood THC levels are used to determine whether a driver is impaired by cannabis.
The majority of states with legal cannabis measure THC intoxication based on whether someone’s THC blood levels fall below a specific cutoff. Findings from the study suggest that blood levels are not a reliable indicator of driving impairment.
Ten of the twelve papers reviewed in this article found that there was no relationship between THC blood levels and the driving test or any other measure. [standard deviation of lateral position (SDLP)]The two papers that did find a significant association were from the same study and found significant relationship with blood THC, SDLP, speed, following distance, reaction time or overall driving performances. Two papers found a significant link between SDLP (serum THC) and blood, as well speed and distance.
The issue was also examined in a federally funded study last year that identified two different methods of more accurately testing for recent THC use that accounts for the fact that metabolites of the cannabinoid can stay present in a person’s system for weeks or months after consumption.
In a 2023 report on a Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies bill, the House Appropriations Committee stated that it “continues support development of an object standard to measure cannabis impairment and related field sobriety tests to ensure highway security.”
A year earlier Sen. John Hickenlooper (D) of Colorado sent a letter to the Department of Transportation (DOT) seeking an update on that status of a federal report into research barriers that are inhibiting the development of a standardized test for marijuana impairment on the roads. The department was required to complete the report under a large-scale infrastructure bill signed by President Joe Biden, but it missed its reporting deadline.
Meanwhile, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) last year warned that marijuana rescheduling could create a “blind spot” with respect to drug testing of federally regulated workers in safety-sensitive positions—despite assurances from then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that the cannabis rescheduling proposal “would not alter” the federal drug testing requirements.
At a House committee hearing, Buttigieg had referenced concerns from ATA “about the broad public health and safety consequences of reclassification on the national highway system and its users,” which the trucking association voiced in a letter to the secretary.
As more states legalize marijuana, a federal report published last year showed that the number of positive drug tests among commercial drivers fell in 2023 compared to the year before, dropping from 57,597 in 2022 to 54,464 in the prior year. The number of drivers refusing to undergo any screening also increased 39 percent.
A second survey found that 65,4 percent of drivers believe that current marijuana tests should be replaced by methods which measure active impairment.
At the time, the report from the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) noted a 65,000-driver deficit in the country and said the fear of positives over marijuana metabolites—which can remain in a person’s blood far long after active impairment—may be keeping would-be drivers out of the industry.
This record number of refusals comes at a time when the industry is facing a shortage of drivers nationwide. Some trade groups say that drug-testing policies are making the situation worse, as they can flag drivers who may not be impaired while on the job.
The current federal law requires commercial drivers to abstain cannabis and subject them to various drug tests, from preemployment testing to random screening.
In June 2022, meanwhile, an ATRI survey of licensed U.S. truck drivers found that 72.4 percent supported “loosening” cannabis laws and testing policies. A further 66.5 per cent said marijuana should be legalized federally.
Cannabis reform advocates, meanwhile, have also called on federal officials to change what they call “discriminatory” drug testing practices around the trucking industry.
A top Wells Fargo analyst said in 2022 that there’s one main reason for rising costs and worker shortages in the transportation sector: federal marijuana criminalization and resulting drug testing mandates that persist even as more states enact legalization.
Then-Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) sent a letter to the head of DOT in 2022, emphasizing that the agency’s policies on drug testing truckers and other commercial drivers for marijuana are unnecessarily costing people their jobs and contributing to supply chain issues.
ATRI’s 2022 report stated that the current research on the effects of marijuana use and driving safety was mixed. This made it difficult to make rules about the subject. A separate 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service (CRS) similarly found that evidence about cannabis’s ability to impair driving is inconclusive.
A study published in 2019 concluded that those who drive at the legal THC limit—which is typically between two to five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood—were not statistically more likely to be involved in an accident compared to people who haven’t used marijuana.
Separately, the Congressional Research Service in 2019 determined that while “marijuana consumption can affect a person’s response times and motor performance … studies of the impact of marijuana consumption on a driver’s risk of being involved in a crash have produced conflicting results, with some studies finding little or no increased risk of a crash from marijuana usage.”
Another study from 2022 found that smoking CBD-rich marijuana had “no significant impact” on driving ability, despite the fact that all study participants exceeded the per se limit for THC in their blood.
Evan as far back as 2015, a U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) concluded that it’s “difficult to establish a relationship between a person’s THC blood or plasma concentration and performance impairing effects,” adding that “it is inadvisable to try and predict effects based on blood THC concentrations alone.”
In a separate report last year, NHTSA said there’s “relatively little research” backing the idea that THC concentration in the blood can be used to determine impairment, again calling into question laws in several states that set “per se” limits for cannabinoid metabolites.
The report noted that although several states had established legal per se cannabis impairment definitions, there was relatively little support for their link to accident risk. The report said that contrary to the consensus of research which establishes an obvious correlation between [blood alcohol content] “Drug concentrations in the blood do not directly correlate with driving impairment.”
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Mike Latimer is the photographer.