Drug Arrests Might Not Stop Truck Drivers from Driving

Drug arrests should revoke an individual commercial driver’s license automatically. An arrest for a drug offense in any state may be indicative of a drug problem, although it could be an isolated incident. Notwithstanding, a person who is taking drugs cannot be fully trusted to operate an 80,000-pound commercial truck traveling at highway speeds. Law enforcement agencies and the trucker’s employer should be involved to remove the potentially dangerous driver from the road. However, the current databases used to track drug arrests and revocation of commercial drivers’ licenses do not work efficiently.

An arrest for a narcotics-related incident in one state will not necessarily trigger an automatic commercial driver’s license revocation in the driver’s home state. Some states, like those in the northeast region of the country, have interstate compacts that obligate the states to communicate with each other about license revocations in one state so that the home state of the driver could revoke the driver’s license. Otherwise, the driver’s rights to operate would be suspended in a foreign state where the drug offense occurred but not in the state in which the driver maintains a commercial driver’s license.

Drivers must tell their employers about drug arrests and other violations of state law, even if the result is the suspension of the driver’s CDL. Experience dictates that very few commercial truck drivers inform on themselves. As a result, there are possibly thousands of commercial truck drivers on the road today that should not be but continue to drive because they never told their employer about a drug arrest.

Drug testing also falls short too. Drug tests are easy to manipulate, and the results, even if the sample was not tampered with, do not provide an accurate history of drug consumption. Urine tests cannot capture so-called hard drugs like heroin or cocaine after a couple of days. Additionally, companies following federal law only test 25% of their employees each year. Accordingly, a driver might evade testing for several years based on a random administration of the tests.

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