Drug driving..

hearing about the new legislation on drug driving is making me more than a little worried. I like most right minded people would never consider getting behind the wheel of a car whilst injecting a £20 bag of heroin, if I had just dropped a couple of tabs of acid the last place I would want to be would be behind the wheel of a car -it is scary enough without tripping!- however being a chronic pain sufferer I am partial to the odd tablet of Co-codamol, a bit of Diclofenic and occasionally Diazapam. Now here is the difficult bit, if I am having a bad time with the pain levels I will take some pain killers and spend the day doing very little and waiting for the pain to pass. The next day however I could be driving and in danger of losing my licence, driving whilst un-insured and face a heavy fine. The trouble is that with drink driving you have a safe limit, this doesn't seem to be the case with prescription drugs and they are designed to stay in your system for a long time. I can see this leading to loads of disabled people being unable to drive through this legislation and they are not the people this law was set out to target.

A good friend of mine get pulled by the sniffer dogs at a few places.These are prescribed drugs,but the dogs still smell them .Makes me laugh,he gets pissed right off.

Sounds like you know alot about drugs! do you work in that field ?

If you've taken a pain killer which makes you drowsy or says do not operate heavy machinery then presumably there's a time limit you shouldn't be driving? As far as I know Diazapam's effects are to act as sedative and induce muscle relaxing which are not conducive to good driving? I'm no expert here and I've driven in the morning after drinking heavily the night before, but I'd presume if they blood test you it will show what substance you've taken, be it legal or otherwise, allowing you to appeal against a ban?

It says on the packets take care whilst driving or operating machinery, without limits I exercise common sense.

parr_street_green wrote:

Sounds like you know alot about drugs! do you work in that field ?

I quite often work in a field.