Alcohol, drugs, and impairment in fatal traffic accidents in British Columbia

Alcohol, illicit drugs and medicinal drugs in fatally injured drivers in Spain between 1991and 2000

“…Alcohol has been frequently detected in Italy (49.0%) [17], in France (45:7% > 0:7 g/l) [18] and in Belgium (28% over 0.49 g/l) [19], whilst figures for the Nordic countries (Sweden: 27% [20] and 20.3% [21], Norway: 28.3% [22]) are considerably lower, perhaps as a result of the fact that in these countries there exists a very strict policy with regard to drinking and driving. High figures have also been recorded for Canada (48%) [23] and some areas of the USA (46%) [24][25][26][27], whereas in Australia figures are lower (36%) [28]. Decreasing trends for drinking and driving have been observed in some industrialised countries like the USA [27].…”

“…This accounts for the high average of substances detected in cases in which some type of illegal drug (1.86) and medicinal drug (1.74) was found in relation to alcohol (1.13). The prevalence of multiple substances (alcohol, illicit drugs, medicinal drugs) used in combination is frequently reported in most of the studies [7][8][9]21,23,24]. The combination of various substances may bring about an increased risk of involvement in road accidents [5,6].…”

Association of main driver-dependent risk factors with the risk of causing a vehicle collision in Spain, 1990–1999

“…Only the value for alcohol use documented by a positive breath test reached a figure higher than 3%, which is much lower than the figures reported in earlier studies (43,47). As noted before (26,27), police officers probably tend to underreport some of these psychophysical alterations, perhaps because they record them only when the driver shows obvious signs of such alteration.…”

“…Unfortunately, the quality and completeness of the DGT traffic crash database have yet to be assessed. We must therefore assume that these data are affected by the same problems as have been described previously for similar databases in other countries, i.e., under-representation of less severe accidents (9,23,24) and an undetermined degree of inaccuracy for driver-related variables (25)(26)(27). Inaccuracies in the ascription of infractions to each driver have been noted previously.…”

“…In addition, our results once again document the effect of alcohol consumption on the risk of being involved in a traffic crash (33,34,(41)(42)(43). The large increase in both crude and adjusted OR estimates for drivers with a positive breath test in comparison to drivers under the influence of alcohol but who did not take a breath test may reflect the joint effect of several factors: (a) information bias in the police officers' visual assessment of the drivers' sobriety (27), (b) other information bias if police officers tended to request a breath test only if they believed that the driver had committed an infraction in this crash (26), and (c) an approximately dose-dependent relationship between alcohol consumption and the risk of causing a collision, assuming that police officers tended to request a breath test more frequently if the driver presented evident signs of inebriation. Although the association we found between use of illicit drugs and the risk of causing a collision is in agreement with earlier findings (27,33,(44)(45)(46), an unbiased estimation of this effect would require an unbiased measurement of drug-related variables, a type of information which is not recorded in the DGT register.…”