What Is A Toxicologist? How Can They Help With A DUI Charge?

Welcome back to the Kruse Law YouTube Channel. I’ve got an interesting topic for you today. What is a toxicologist? Is the first question. Secondly, how can they help with a DUI charge? Well, first of all, a toxicologist in simple terms, as a scientist. They study the effects of drugs, alcohol, toxins and chemicals on the human body. And they’re experts in interpreting, for example, how drugs and alcohol metabolize and affect the human body and impaired symptoms. And they can be very helpful in DUI cases, because they also understand how the Intoxilyzer interpreting, interpreting blood alcohol concentrations and drugs, etc. So let me give you some examples of how they can help and how our firm use them. I’ll give you a few examples. So, let’s say you have an impaired driving case and you’ve hired a toxicologist, and they discover, for example, by looking at the breath room video, that the breath technician did not set up the machine properly. There were some errors made, etc. Well, you’re showing errors in the process there. There’s one example. So, another example, for example, let’s say the police, you’re charged with impaired by a drug and there was THC found in your system, and the levels were established by a scientist. Well, we could hire a toxicologist to say, for example, well, that level of THC would not impair your driving. Another situation where there’s after the fact, let’s say after you finished driving, you went home and you drank. Well, and that level of alcohol was drank mostly at home. Well, we could hire toxicologists to say, well, look, those three beers he had at home raises blood alcohol to over the legal limit, but at the time of driving, he’d only had one beer, so he’s under the legal limit. So, in other words, they’re interpreting results in a different way. They’re analyzing whether the testing procedures were done properly, and we often hire them for these reasons. Another example, which is a very, very helpful example, is many of these toxicologists we hire in the province are experts at the drug recognition evaluation tests. There’s 12 tests that the police do if you’re charged with impaired by drug. They bring you back to the police station. They make a demand that you do an extensive drug recognition evaluation, all these balance and coordination tests and eye tests and taking your blood or urine, etc. What we do, oftentimes I will usually, I will recognize, hey, there’s an error made, but I can’t get up to the witness stand and say that, but we hire toxicologists to analyze and say there’s the error, and these results are not accurate. In other words, the drug recognition police officer, the expert, did the whole process wrong, and the person, he could not have determined the person’s impaired because it’s garbage in garbage out. If you don’t do tests right, and the toxicologist is able to say that, then you could potentially win the case. So, there’s a few of many examples where we hire toxicologists to interpret results give different spins on cases. Show the police made errors in testing procedures all designed to potentially create a reasonable doubt and win your case with the help of an expert, toxicologist, scientist that is testifying in court.