CLEVELAND, Ohio — This past summer, the Ohio State Highway Patrol rolled out a new oral test to determine if a person was driving under the influence of marijuana.
Through this new oral fluid test, troopers swab inside a person's mouth on site.
"One thing about oral fluid is, as long as the drug is active in someone's bloodstream, it shows up in their oral fluid. If I inject the drug in my veins, it'll show up in my oral fluid because we have such a high concentration of blood vessels in our mouth that oral fluid will pick up that drug of abuse in the sample," Captain Christopher Kinn, Ohio State Highway Patrol Executive Officer of the Office of Field Operations, said.
Troopers then send the sample to a lab to get the verified results.
The process is both more efficient and less invasive, according to Kinn.
A traditional breathalyzer would not pick up on drugs—prompting further blood or urine testing.
"With blood, we have a challenge that law enforcement officers can't just collect blood from someone that's been arrested. We'd have to take them to a hospital and get processed that way. Urine, there's some issue. With urine like a same-sex collection, being a male, I can't collect a urine sample from a female." Kinn said.
While recreational marijuana is legal—officials say this style of testing was not done in response to the legislation.
"This had been in the works long before any of this. It's about safety," Kinn said.
Kinn also points out that probable cause is necessary and that troopers are not just pulling over random people on the roads.
"It's not that we're just gonna be driving around and having people submit to these tests. It's only when there's probable cause based off of the field sobriety tests that were performed, the interaction with the person, and what kind of driving behavior we saw from them," Kinn said.
It takes roughly 30-45 days to get results from the Ohio State Highway Patrol toxicology lab in Columbus.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol says this pilot program will last several months.
They will review the results.
Troopers will then consider whether it will be a fully implemented process in the long term.
