Officers on the ground are starting to get restless. A driver being tested for drugs has been inside the police booze bus for about an hour.
It’s Friday night and this Weekly reporter is out with the Hobsons Bay highway patrol at the place where the Princes Freeway, Western Ring Road and West Gate Freeway meet.
Acting Sergeant Graeme Crouch says it should only take five minutes for the 29-year-old inside the bus to be tested for drugs. The driver would have been asked to lick what police call a “stick”. It looks like a pregnancy test and two red lines indicate a positive result.
“Probably around here, ice would be the drug of choice,” Acting Sergeant Crouch says.
Eventually, the man emerges from the bus and we learn why his drug test took so long. His mouth was so dry from methamphetamine that it took more than an hour to get a saliva sample.
He’ll be fined $433 and have his licence suspended for three months.
Later, a 26-year-old Glenroy man also tests positive for methamphetamines.
On this night, drivers on drugs outnumber those exceeding the blood-alcohol limit of .05.
The real number of drug drivers could be much higher given that not every motorist is tested for drugs. Of 1011 motorists tested, one drink-driver is caught: a 28-year-old Werribee man who blows .085.
Acting Sergeant Crouch says many motorists are still over the limit the day after a night of drinking. Or, in the worst case he’s seen, 18 hours after the last drink.
Senior Sergeant Damien Madden, of the major collision unit, says people can drive to work the next day and be over the limit.
“A lot of alcoholics will have a baseline level. They’ll never get back to zero because they’re drinking so often and they only need a couple and it tops them up again.”
He sees the aftermath of alcohol combined with cars, citing a double fatality where two teenagers returning from a nightclub died.
“I went to a fatality in Eumemmerring back in the early 2000s and it was a chap that was in his early 20s. He’d been out drinking at an Irish pub all night.
“His friends did all the right things; put him to bed at a mate’s home.
“And he just had it in his mind he wanted to go home. Got up, grabbed the keys and jumped in the car and crashed through a red light at high speed, collided with the passenger side of a right-turning car that had a green arrow and killed two of the occupants in that car and seriously injured the other two.”
