Drugs and Driving: Steer Clear of Deadly Drowsiness

Nov. 27, 2011— -- I Fell Asleep!

That's what the dazed woman exclaimed after Chuck Hayes found her slumped over the steering wheel of her crashed car.

Hayes had been patrolling a rural stretch of Interstate 5 north of Salem, OR, just after midnight on New Year's Eve, when he glimpsed a flash of red in the hedge along the median strip. It took a moment for the veteran state police officer to register what he'd seen: taillights shining out from the shrubbery. He doubled back and found a subcompact embedded in the bushes. In the driver's seat sat a woman in her 40s, conscious and apparently uninjured.

When Hayes approached and called out to her, her eyelids fluttered, and she looked surprised by her surroundings. From her slurred speech and abysmal performance on the field sobriety test (which included the time-tested "touch your finger to your nose" and so forth), Hayes guessed she'd been hitting the champagne, but there was no hint of alcohol on her breath. When she opened her purse to get her driver's license, he spotted the cause of her intoxication: a handful of small prescription bottles.

What You Need To Know about Prescription Drugs

She was carrying three common medications: a sleeping pill, a tranquilizer, and an antidepressant. Leaning against her car, too impaired to stand for more than a few minutes, the woman explained that her doctor had recently prescribed the drugs to help her through a rough patch--just the ordinary woes of a middle-aged waitress. That night she'd been working, not celebrating, and had planned to go to bed as soon as she got home. Her doctor had told her that the sleep med would kick in half an hour after she swallowed it. Her commute took 15 minutes, so she'd popped the pill just before getting in the car, thinking her timing was perfect. But she'd blacked out and drifted off the road.

As it happened, for the past 17 years, Hayes had been serving (as he still does) as a drug-recognition expert (DRE), one of more than 6,500 officers nationwide who are specially trained to evaluate drivers affected by substances other than alcohol. He knew that sleeping pills, like any other medication, don't always behave as expected, especially when taken in conjunction with other drugs, such as those he'd seen in the waitress's purse. He also knew she was lucky not to have been injured--or to have hurt someone else. Hayes booked her for driving under the influence, a crime that increasingly covers impairment caused by prescription medications, not just alcohol and illegal drugs, and she was duly convicted. She pleaded guilty and, as a first offender, was sentenced to a year's probation instead of jail.

***

More from Prevention: