Los controles de drogas a conductores en Españaanálisis de la legislación, la formación específica de los profesionales y los dispositivos de detección

Resumen

At the First World Interministerial Conference on Road Safety held in Moscow, sponsored by the United Nations, annual road accident figures were considered higher than 1,200,000 deaths, 50 million injured, and associated economic costs of 1.5% of GDP global, all this considered as a first-order public health problem and classified as a true pandemic worldwide by the WHO, which has become the leading cause of death in the population sector between 5 and 29 years of age; Therefore, within the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2020, and under the slogan of "It is time to act", the Road Safety Strategy was designed with the intention of setting a goal of reducing by 40% the number of deaths as a result of road accidents. With regard to our country, and according to data from the National Institute of Toxicology and Forensic Sciences in its report for the year 2019, and referring to the previous year, 45.5% of the analyzes of drivers who died in traffic accidents, showed presence of alcohol, illicit drugs or psychotropic drugs in their body, of which 61.8% belonged to alcohol, 44.1% to illegal drugs and 27.2% to psychotropic drugs. Of these figures, it is worth mentioning the worrying data, that, of the illegal drugs figures, 56.3% belonged to the presence of cannabis, and 52.7% to cocaine. The consumption of psychoactive substances other than alcohol is frequent in Spanish drivers. The European research project DRUID (Driving Under Influence of Alcohol, Drugs and Medicines), places our country in the first place of the participants regarding the consumption of psychoactive substances (all), of cannabis, cocaine, and, in combination of alcohol and drugs. Drugged driving research is more complex than alcohol research and is subject to serious uncertainties such as the lack of legal standardization at the EU level, knowledge of the correlation of different levels of consumption with psychomotor impairment, and effectiveness of the tests and reliability of the incidental detection devices, of the establishment of cut-off limits by the different manufacturers, of the lack of standardization in the analytical procedures, detection thresholds and cut-off levels used in the laboratories that perform the tests. confirmation tests, etc., which means that the current intervention model is not effective and efficient to combat the problem of drugged driving. In this study, we address the problems associated with driving vehicles under the consumption of psychoactive substances other than alcohol, while proposing a system to combat drugged driving, based on clear and coherent legislation, especially in law enforcement officials. trained and reliable tests and detection devices adapted to current legislation.