CHARGING DRIVERS IMPAIRED BY CANNABIS

  With cannabis legalization less than two weeks away, police are highly likely to continue to depend on urine testing for the foreseeable future, officials said, despite the fact the government created a legal shortcut for laying impaired driving charges based on blood samples.
  Without blood samples, police cannot lay three new charges for drivers impaired by cannabis created under Bill C-46. The charges are based on the level of THC — the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana — found in the blood. Instead, police will continue to rely on older drug-impaired driving charges based partly on urine samples in the majority of cases, officials said.

   Drug-impaired driving is currently a major drain on court resources. A Statistics Canada brief prepared for a Senate committee earlier this year found that drug-impaired driving cases currently take about twice as long to litigate in court than alcohol-impairment cases, and are less likely to receive a guilty verdict.