DRE Evaluations And Prescription Medications

Thank you so much for joining me today. I picked what I think is an interesting topic that many of my clients have asked me over the years, and that is, how do prescription medications affect the DRE evaluation? That’s the drug recognition evaluation Dre it’ called. So let’s give you an example. So you’re pulled over, and there’s an odour of alcohol your breath, but you had some bad driving, maybe and a little bit of slurred speech, you appear tired, and the officer suspects that there’s drugs in your system. You’re drug impaired driving.  So they give you some tests outside, divided attention tests and balance tests outside that you supposedly fail. Now they’re going to bring you back to the police station. They’re going to arrest you for impaired by drug. They’re going to make a demand for a drug recognition evaluation test. So this is an expert police officer that’s been trained in this. They’re going to bring you back the police station, and an officer is going to put you through the series of 12 tests. They’re very  intricate tests. There’s balance tests like the one leg stand. Rhomberg test. There’s the horizontal gaze and stigmas test where you follow the finger to see if you have jerky movements. They’re going to take your pulse, your blood pressure, your muscle tone, all sorts of things they’re going to do to determine, ultimately, if you’re impaired by drug. They’re also either going to take a blood test or a urine test. Now I can tell you that someone on prescription medications like blood pressure pills, maybe sleeping pills, you know antidepressants, they can affect each one of these tests in certain ways to give you a false positive. Now let’s take a look at the one leg stand, for example. So some people on blood pressure pills, may not have good balance in that regard. You know, all sorts of things. Each test can be effective in this way because of the effect of the prescription medication and maybe a false positive. 

Now, ultimately, when you get your urine results from it, or your blood sample response, it may show the prescription you’re on. God, help you. Hopefully it’s not another drug in there, because that’s a whole different problem. If you’ve got cocaine or something your system, you may very well get convicted. But the whole point of meaning is, I represented quite a few people over the years who were on prescription medications, and we were able to win by hiring a toxicologist first interpreting these results in a different way. You know, these tests are hard to do for anyone. You take a middle aged person up or up, or a person my age, I’m 63 now, I’m not so sure how  well I would do with these balance tests, anyway. So they’re easy to fail. And they’re particularly easy to fail if you’re on these type of prescription medications, which can affect balance and coordination, muscle tone, even they take muscle tone, because certain prescription medications can affect that. And so I’ve won many of those type of cases over the years. So each case has to be looked at individually, but prescription medications in conjunction with the DRE evaluation is a very interesting area that a good lawyer can often win, because your results can be interpreted a different way. And of course, we often will hire a toxicologist for that type of case to interpret those results and also to show that the police a lot of times they don’t do the DRE evaluation correctly. These tests have to be performed a certain way perfectly to be able to interpret results properly. And by the way, urine, but if they just take urine and it shows the THC in your system or another drug, that doesn’t mean it was in your bloodstream at the time, the more proper test it should be blood sample. But urine just will it’s a very weak indicator, by the way, what’s in your urine, it just, it doesn’t kill your impaired at the time at all. So I’m always much happier when the police did just do a urine sample, which might show THC, THC. Well, probably 50, 60% Canadians are going to have THC in their urine at any given time. It doesn’t mean they are impaired at the time on the THC. So there’s a quick primer. Is it? Is it a defendable area often when you have a prescription medication and as long as there aren’t other drugs in your system like cocaine and what not at the time it may not be defendable but I’ve often won those types of cases. I’m glad I had a chance to speak to you about this today.