Bad idea of the week: the government taking your saliva (and DNA)

For a party that is skeptical of government (and rightly so), we can be strangely enthusiastic about handing that government more and more power in an area where its mistakes are most destructive to people’s lives: criminal law.  The latest proposal to do so comes from Del. Glenn Davis (R-Virginia Beach), who has filed a misguided bill which would allow police to take the saliva of any driver suspected of driving while impaired.

Davis justified the proposal by telling WTVR that “this issue is just as big as driving under the influence of alcohol,” a statement which shows an alarming ignorance of what is actually happening on our roads.  Barely one-eighth of all drivers in fatal accidents tested positive for any trace of any drug in their system, and given that drugs remain in the body long after their effect wears off, the number of these crashes actually caused by drugs is almost certainly a small fraction of this already small fraction.  Alcohol causes many, many times the number of road deaths.

Even more importantly, it remains unclear what level of drug use actually impairs driving ability, meaning the results of any test would be generally useless.  There is no equivalent to the .08 BAC (Blood Alcohol Content) standard recognized by every state.  Since the same drug can have a dramatically different effect on different people, officers would just end up relying on the tools they already have and which are already effective – field sobriety tests.

Unlike a breathalyzer, your saliva includes your DNA, and there is no reason to allow government access to that information based on nothing but a hunch and in a scenario where it wouldn’t even help enforce the law.  The presence of the state’s DNA database and extremely broad provisions for using DNA mean that Virginians should be wary of yet another means of harvesting it from people who have been charged and convicted with absolutely nothing.

The bill was apparently inspired by a fatal incident in Gloucester which involved a driver under the influence of drugs.  Davis complained that driver “got a very small sentence” despite killing a woman and her unborn child.  If the problem is that this driver wasn’t tested and therefore his drug use couldn’t be proved in court, then the solution is simple: allow testing in fatal accidents, or possibly any accident where someone is hospitalized.  Instead there are no limitations here, resulting in a bill which has all the features that Republicans are supposed to dislike in government – broad new powers created in a reactionary manner which are out of proportion to the problem they are trying to solve.  And as always, the taxpayer will end up paying for it all.

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