Spotting a drunk driver is standard police training, but authorities want to increase officer awareness of signs someone is driving under the influence of drugs.
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Matthew Lowe, a trooper with the Pennsylvania State Police, talks about constricted pupils during an Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement, or ARIDE, session Thursday at Lehigh Valley Hospital-Muhlenberg in Bethlehem.
Lehigh Township police Patrolman Jonathan Roth was driving on Route 145 one night this winter when he came across a car traveling on the yellow line.
When asked for his driver’s license, the man produced his credit card.
Roth didn’t smell alcohol on his breath, but training Roth received led him to know the man’s very slow response times were signs he was under the influence of drugs, instead.
Seeking to learn more about those signs, 45 police officers are taking part in training Thursday and today at Lehigh Valley Hospital in Bethlehem. The course is called Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement, or ARIDE.
Every Pennsylvania police officer learns how to recognize alcohol impairment as part of standard training, but that’s not the case with drug impairment, said George Geisler, the eastern Pennsylvania law enforcement director with the Pennsylvania DUI Association.
And while most people have seen someone drunk, very few have seen people under the influence of multiple drugs, making their detection more difficult, Geisler said.
“It’s very, very hard to detect if you’re not properly trained,” he said.
To combat that, the Pennsylvania DUI Association hosts dozens of training courses across the state, including one or two every year in the Lehigh Valley.
“OxyContin doesn’t smell, cocaine doesn’t smell,” Roth said. “This class instructs officers to use things other than smell.”
One technique the officers learned Thursday was to have suspected drug users stand still with their eyes closed and head tilted back for 30 seconds. A suspect under the influence of drugs will likely sway, tremor and have a hard time calculating when 30 seconds have passed, said state police Trooper Matthew Lowe, one of the session’s trainers.
About 31 percent of the 50,000 people arrested in Pennsylvania last year for driving under the influence had drugs in their system, Geisler said. That percentage is on the rise, with the chief reason being increased police training, Geisler said.
“We’re getting more and more people under the influence of drugs at every DUI test point,” said Bethlehem police Sgt. John Karb. “The training has come a long way over 30 years.”
This week’s training at Lehigh Valley Hospital aims to give local police officers more expertise to be able to charge more people with driving under the influence of drugs, but local departments generally call in certified drug recognition experts to assist when possible.
The Lehigh Valley has only seven such trained officers because the course involves nine days of training and requires officers to receive a perfect score on a drug recognition test, said Bethlehem Township police Sgt. Daryl LaPointe, one of the local experts.
LaPointe took the local Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement class in 2010, and it got him interested in becoming a Drug Recognition Expert. The DRE test involves going to a drug treatment center and correctly diagnosing drugs used by incoming patients, he said.