Le Figaro Nice
Increased reaction time, reduced ability to make a decision, altered awareness of the environment: driving under drugs represents 21% of annual road deaths.
That's an average of 700 people killed each year in
"an accident involving a driver who has consumed drugs"
, according to the latest figures from Road Safety.
A scourge which does not stop at individuals but which also concerns bus and coach drivers.
At the wheel of machines weighing 10 to 20 tonnes and while they are sometimes responsible for several dozen passengers, some do not hesitate to carry out their tour under cannabis or cocaine.
It is under these conditions that a bus driver from the Nice transport authority “Lignes d'Azur” (RLA) made an impressive exit from the road on January 12 in the early morning, in Levens, near Nice.
The bus plunged several meters into the void, ending up on a railway track.
Two teenagers were seriously injured in the accident.
Ten days later, the Alpes-Maritimes gendarmerie, which had then decided to intensify its checks in the valleys, arrested two new bus drivers, who in turn tested positive for narcotics.
On Tuesday, a 28-year-old young man, a coach driver for a Nice transport company, was given an eight-month suspended prison sentence after having tested positive for drugs the day before and above all... without a driving license. to drive.
Read alsoBus drivers under the influence of alcohol or drugs: a Maralpine senator wants to strengthen controls
Annual blood test
It is to compensate for this worrying state of affairs - and undoubtedly also to reassure users - that the Nice Metropolis has decided to subject its approximately 900 drivers to random saliva screening tests.
In the metropolitan council on February 20, the deputy for Transport Gaël Nofri presented this Nice ambition, indicating that a modification of the internal regulations must first be approved in CSE.
This is today done.
The measure should come into force within a few weeks.
“By the end of March
,” assures Gaël Nofri, also president of RLA.
On the other hand, positive saliva tests will always be supplemented by a blood test, to avoid false positives.
And to add in this sense: “
If the unions were very cooperative and even demanding, they wanted to be reassured as to the certainty in the tests.
This is why we will not be satisfied with saliva samples
,” he explains.
In addition, the elected official indicates that he has written to the prefect and the public prosecutor to ask them to continue such checks on the roads by the police and gendarmerie services.
“On the other hand, I insisted on the need for these checks to be carried out outside the routes, either at the beginning or at the end of the tours, so as not to create disorganization of the service
,” he specifies.
At the end of February, Senator (LR) Maralpine Alexandra Borchio-Fontimp had for her part proposed, in a written question to the government and addressed to the Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, that an annual blood test be imposed on bus drivers.
And this,
“unexpectedly”
.
The parliamentarian had also asked France's top cop
for “better supervision of the use of alcohol immobilizers”
(EAD).