The US has far too few Drug Recognition Experts.
Drug Recognition Experts, or DREs, are the gold standard for people trained to detect drug impairment. They must attend and pass a special school that’s entirely focused on recognizing the various signs and symptoms of drug impairment. Officers are trained on a broad variety of substances, and are expected to be able to accurately identify drug impairment on all of them. This training is intended to make the officers that pass the school their department’s foremost expert on drug impairment. When someone who’s suspected to be impaired on drugs is found, the Drug Recognition Expert then performs an evaluation and reports their findings. This is often the basis of drug impaired driving DUI charges, and other criminal charges.
As we legalize cannabis in the United States, Drug Recognition Experts are increasingly in demand. They are often called upon to visit the scene of a suspected DUI offender, or to perform an evaluation on a suspect at the police station before formal charges are filed. With the demands being placed on DREs, one must immediately consider the quantity of DREs to perform the evaluations. There are quite simply far too few DRE trained police officers to meet the demands of drug impaired driving, and other drug-related charges.
A logical question when considering the problem of drug impaired drivers would be: why not just expand the DRE program and use those officers to detect impairment? The Drug Recognition Expert program has been shown to produce reasonably accurate results (up to 81% for cannabis, depending on which study you look at). The real problem with expanding the program is that very few officers want to become Drug Recognition Experts. Please see the table below for specifics on numbers of DREs per state, and per capita DREs.
Officers considering whether to become a DRE usually choose not to. There are several concerns that officers have with becoming a Drug Recognition Expert. It begins with the school - the curriculum is challenging, and not all officers will pass it. They have to memorize countless indicators of drug impairment, learn to differentiate between classes of drugs, and understand nuances of human physiology, drug interactions, and know how to respond to each. This is no easy task and the black mark associated with attempting to become a Drug Recognition Expert and failing, causes many officers to reconsider whether they want to even try. Second, Drug Recognition Expert officers have to spend a lot of time in court. Every time they are the DRE that evaluates a person who's case ends up going to trial, they will be asked to testify. They have to tell the court precisely how they arrived at the conclusions they did, and then are subjected to cross examination by hostile defense attorneys. This is no easy matter, and even the most seasoned DRE officers can be subjected to harsh criticism in the process. Lastly, there are continuing education requirements for Drug Recognition Experts. This additional annual refresher course takes precious time away from their other duties. All of these requirements are logical, but add up to a responsibility that most officers don’t want to take on.
So how severe is the Drug Recognition Expert shortage? Simply put, there aren’t nearly enough DRE officers to conduct the necessary work. Most small to mid size cities only have a few officers trained, and some larger cities are even more severely short. For example, there are only 6 Drug Recognition Experts officers in all of Washington D.C.
This image is from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It shows the total number of Drug Recognition Experts in each state and the year the Drug Evaluation and Classification Program (DECP) was started in in each state.
The table below displays the number of DREs in each state. We then divided the number of DREs by population in an attempt to understand how many DREs there are per 100,000 population. This is an important number as it shows a relative density of DREs by state, which can help us understand
| STATE | Number of DREs | Population | DREs per 100,000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| AL | 14 | 4,934,193 | 0.284 |
| AK | 41 | 724,357 | 5.660 |
| AZ | 283 | 7,520,103 | 3.763 |
| AR | 141 | 3,033,946 | 4.647 |
| CA | 1759 | 39,613,493 | 4.440 |
| CO | 203 | 5,893,634 | 3.444 |
| CT | 52 | 3,552,821 | 1.464 |
| DE | 34 | 990,334 | 3.433 |
| FL | 302 | 21,944,577 | 1.376 |
| GA | 218 | 10,830,007 | 2.013 |
| HI | 64 | 1,406,430 | 4.551 |
| ID | 124 | 1,860,123 | 6.666 |
| IL | 109 | 12,569,321 | 0.867 |
| IN | 118 | 6,805,663 | 1.734 |
| IA | 128 | 3,167,974 | 4.040 |
| KS | 87 | 2,917,224 | 2.982 |
| KY | 51 | 4,480,713 | 1.138 |
| LA | 122 | 4,627,002 | 2.637 |
| ME | 111 | 1,354,522 | 8.195 |
| MD | 157 | 6,065,436 | 2.588 |
| MA | 76 | 6,912,239 | 1.099 |
| MI | 133 | 9,992,427 | 1.331 |
| MN | 209 | 5,706,398 | 3.663 |
| MS | 27 | 2,966,407 | 0.910 |
| MO | 132 | 6,169,038 | 2.140 |
| MT | 59 | 1,085,004 | 5.438 |
| NE | 109 | 1,951,996 | 5.584 |
| NV | 108 | 3,185,786 | 3.390 |
| NH | 74 | 1,372,203 | 5.393 |
| NJ | 463 | 8,874,520 | 5.217 |
| NM | 73 | 2,105,005 | 3.468 |
| NY | 257 | 19,299,981 | 1.332 |
| NC | 146 | 10,701,022 | 1.364 |
| ND | 47 | 770,026 | 6.104 |
| OH | 205 | 11,714,618 | 1.750 |
| OK | 166 | 3,990,443 | 4.160 |
| OR | 207 | 4,289,439 | 4.826 |
| PA | 186 | 12,804,123 | 1.453 |
| RI | 63 | 1,061,509 | 5.935 |
| SC | 119 | 5,277,830 | 2.255 |
| SD | 62 | 896,581 | 6.915 |
| TN | 148 | 6,944,260 | 2.131 |
| TX | 403 | 29,730,311 | 1.356 |
| UT | 86 | 3,310,774 | 2.598 |
| VT | 55 | 623,251 | 8.825 |
| VA | 26 | 8,603,985 | 0.302 |
| WA | 192 | 7,796,941 | 2.463 |
| WV | 54 | 1,767,859 | 3.055 |
| WI | 294 | 5,852,490 | 5.024 |
| WY | 47 | 581,075 | 8.088 |
| DC | 6 | 714,153 | 0.840 |
With so few Drug Recognition Expert officers, and very few officers that want to be trained as DREs, what do we do about the problem of drug impaired driving? The only answer appears to be Gaize. We’re building the only fully automated Standardized Field Sobriety Test for cannabis. It’s entirely objective, and based on the physiological symptoms of impairment. Quite simply, without adequate Drug Recognition Experts, we must have a way to test for drug impairment.
Further, given the accuracy and subjectivity concerns that the Drug Recognition Expert program elicits, Gaize is a far superior path forward.
