ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the historical setting for the problem of cannabis-impaired driving, sets forth the legal process within which the collection of evidence for impaired driving takes place in most U.S. states, and describes in brief the type of science used in analytic chemistry – ion mobility spectrometry (IMS) – that likely provides the most promising path toward to creating an analog to the portable breath test (PBT) screening device for law-enforcement use in cannabis-impaired driving. Given the rapid metabolization of ?nforcement use in cannabTHC) into nonpsychotropic elements in the blood, there is an urgent need for point of contract documentation of recent acute exposure to THC to provide law-enforcement officers with an effective screening device in cases of suspected cannabis-impaired driving. In due course, impairing drugs other than cannabis can be detected and documented from human breath samples in the same manner using this technology. The IMS technology being tested is similar to that used in airports for the detection of explosives, in field ambient scanning in hazardous materials settings, and in cross-border illicit drug commerce. The authors have been working on the THC breathalyzer project since 2010 in a collaborative effort of the Hill Laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at Washington State University and the Division of Governmental Studies and Services, units of the College of Arts and Sciences. This research has been supported by funding and in-kind support from the State of Washington (Alcohol and Drug Addiction Research Program and the Department of Social and Health Services), the Washington State Patrol, the Washington Traffic Safety Commission, Washington State University Office of Research, and by the Chemring Detection Systems Company of Charlotte, North Carolina.
