The Ohio Senate unanimously passed legislation last week to overhaul the way that prosecutors must prove whether a person was driving under the influence of marijuana.
Ohio, like most the rest of the nation, has liberalized its marijuana laws over the past decade, now allowing recreational and medical use of the drug in a variety of forms.
This has posed a tricky challenge of setting a legal standard that prohibits driving while under the influence of marijuana, while not ensnaring people who are sober on the road but have used the drug in the past few days.
And unlike with alcohol’s well established limit of .08 percent of blood alcohol content as the legal threshold for impaired driving, the science around cannabis concentration in the blood is far murkier. Some people with high concentrations wouldn’t exhibit behavioral signs of impairment, while some people with low concentrations would, studies show.
“The current law allows for the conviction of innocent people, 100 percent straight out,” said Tim Huey in an interview, who lobbied for the bill on behalf of fellow DUI defense attorneys.
What the bill would do for drivers of accused of being high
Senate Bill 55, if agreed to by the Ohio House and the governor, would bring two big changes for people accused of driving while high. For one, it ends prosecutors’ current ability to convict drivers for driving under the influence based solely on the presence of marijuana “metabolites” in a person’s system.
Metabolites are the non-psychoactive byproduct of marijuana produced as the body breaks down (metabolizes) marijuana. Those metabolites can linger in a person’s system as long as 30 days after use, according to researchers and defense attorneys who support the bill.
Instead, police and prosecutors must show the presence of Delta 9-THC, the active ingredient that produces the high sensation.
The legislation also gives people accused of driving while high an opportunity to rebut the evidence against them if a comparatively lower concentration of marijuana is detected in their systems. That’s opposed to the “per se” system in current law, where a positive drug test almost guarantees a conviction.
“Basically right now we’re testing inactive metabolites, mostly through urine, and it’s really not accurate,” said Sen. Nathan Manning, a Lorain County Republican and former prosecutor who has pushed the legal change for years. “The inactive metabolites don’t show impairment, it just shows whether or not you used it [in the past].”
Several sources described the legal thresholds set in the legislation as the product of more art than science, and a compromise between prosecutors and defense attorneys who lobbied the bill.
Hellbound and Down 