What NC laws and experts say about cannabis-impaired driving
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▪ What you need to know: A young driver accused of crashing into and killing a Garner family after allegedly smoking marijuana is due in court July 29.
▪ What we know about marijuana and driving: Cannabis-impaired driving seems to be on the rise in North Carolina, but due to the complex ways the body metabolizes the drug, there is not as clear-cut a way to define legal impairment as with alcohol.
The driver who crashed into and killed a family of three in Garner on Memorial Day reportedly had evidence of alcohol in his system and had reportedly smoked marijuana before the crash.
But in North Carolina, that doesn’t automatically mean he was impaired while driving.
Jordan Porter, 25, faces nine charges, including second-degree murder, felony death by vehicle and possession of marijuana paraphernalia in the May 27 crash that killed Tyler Campbell, 28, Susan Campbell, 29, and their 8-year-old son Miles.
Porter, who was severely injured and hospitalized after in the crash, is due in court Monday.
Porter’s blood alcohol content was well below the limit set by state law, his attorney Karl Knudsen said. Porter’s wife also told investigators that he had smoked marijuana before the crash, according to search warrants.
Statewide, cannabis-impaired driving seems to be on the rise, State Highway Patrol Sgt. Devin Rich said. Between April 2023 and December 2023, there were 82 drug-influence evaluations performed across state law enforcement agencies that detected cannabis, Rich said. From January through June of this year, 137 evaluations found cannabis present.
In May, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended state governments and school officials increase education on the dangers of driving after using cannabis. The guidance is part of an investigation into a 2022 crash that killed six teens in Oklahoma, where cannabis use was found to be a factor.
But, overall, cannabis-impaired driving data is hard to track, said Katie Harmon, a researcher at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center.
The statewide crash dashboard shows 16,900 drug-related crashes in North Carolina from 2019 to 2023 (compared to 62,100 alcohol related crashes) out of 1.5 million total crashes in the state. But different agencies have different testing procedures, and state data doesn’t separate cannabis from other substances as factors in vehicle crashes.
Ahead of Porter’s July 29 arraignment, here’s what to know about cannabis-impaired driving laws in North Carolina.
Driving while high on cannabis falls under general impairment
In North Carolina, a person commits the crime of impaired driving if they:
Have a blood alcohol content greater than 0.08 grams per milliliter of blood. This is a “per se” regulation — after hitting the limit, the law considers you automatically impaired.
Have any Schedule I drugs (including heroin, LSD or fentanyl) or drug byproducts in their blood. This is a “zero-tolerance” regulation — with any amount of those substances detected, the law considers you automatically impaired.
Are otherwise “under the influence of an impairing substance.”
Driving while high on cannabis falls under the third category. In those cases, prosecutors rely on patrol-officer and drug-expert testimony about the driver’s roadside behavior and the presence of an impairing drug.
Research doesn’t support a per se driving limit for cannabis, North Carolina experts say
More than a dozen states around the U.S. have limits on cannabis blood levels that automatically prove impairment, North Carolina isn’t one of them.
Existing research doesn’t support a specific number, said Katie Harmon, a researcher at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center.
Decades of research established the alcohol-impairment level. The complex ways humans process cannabis and its derivatives aren’t as well understood, she said, and people’s response to the drug varies widely due to tolerance and other factors.
“Just the way cannabis acts from what we know already, it’s never going to have that clear-cut relationship that alcohol has,” she said. “That’s why there may never actually be a safe level of THC in the body that we can use for legal purposes.”
That affects how useful blood tests for THC, the main impairing component of cannabis, can be. The chemical’s presence in blood can’t reliably indicate how recently someone used or was impaired by cannabis, criminal defense attorney Steven Saad said.
“Even if someone is not impaired on marijuana at the time the blood is drawn, there’s still going to be remnants of the non-active metabolite,” he explained. Metabolites are chemical byproducts the body produces when breaking down a drug.
Detecting and prosecuting cannabis impaired driving
Officers generally detect cannabis impairment based on roadside behavior. In Porter’s case, Knudsen said the driver was too badly hurt for officers to collect the evidence they usually would roadside.
During a traffic stop, officers often perform field sobriety tests, said Saad, a former Wake County prosecutor. That includes asking a driver to walk and turn, balance on one leg and follow a pen with their eyes. Trouble balancing or excessively jerky eyes while performing these tasks can both be evidence of impairment.
Officers will also take note of any smells or nearby substances in a vehicle that indicate the presence of marijuana.
Specialists called drug-recognition experts sometimes perform more extensive tests that determine what class of drugs a driver may have taken. There are about 160 such experts across the state, Rich said.
In court, prosecutors try to prove impaired driving by combining patrol officer and expert observations with lab tests showing evidence of cannabis in the blood, criminal defense attorney Trevor Guyton said.
But drug-recognition experts aren’t used in every cannabis impairment case, Saad said. Their absence is an oversight defense attorneys will go after in court.
Other aspects of impaired-driving prosecution are too tailored to alcohol impairment, Guyton said. For instance, some field sobriety tests are designed and standardized to detect alcohol only, he said, but are still used during cannabis-impairment cases.
“We got a system that’s built for alcohol detection,” he said. “But we’re trying to kind of put this drug-detection prosthetic on top.”
NC Reality Check is an N&O series holding those in power accountable and shining a light on public issues that affect the Triangle or North Carolina. Have a suggestion for a future story? Email realitycheck@newsobserver.com
This story was originally published July 24, 2024 at 12:11 PM.
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