It took a minute the first time.
The officers at the training session could tell the person was impaired, but something was different, and they weren’t quite sure what. They’d been through their roadside training tests, and the responses just didn’t quite point to alcohol as the source.
“All they’re doing is detecting this person is impaired,” says Sgt. Dan Klump of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Police.
Klump, a Boating Under the Influence instructor, was running what was known as a “wet lab,” in which volunteers consume alcohol for police to practice their skills, putting live subjects through the tests they learn in Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement (ARIDE). It’s a valuable experience for officers, says Klump, designed to help them get experience seeing the clues of alcohol impairment in real subjects. But the clues the officers were seeing in this one volunteer just weren’t quite matching up with the training, until one of them remembered an impairment that voters had just legalized that they might see that summer.
“One of the people in the class, he leaned back in a chair and looked at me, and he put his hand up to his mouth, kind of mimicking smoking a joint and he goes, ‘Klump, is this guy high?’” remembers Klump. “And I just had the biggest grin on my face.”
The first, unofficial “green lab” had just been a success.
Stoned for Public Safety
Police receive a lot of training to be able to detect signs of alcohol impairment, but as Washington became the second state to allow adult-use cannabis, Klump began to think about a “more advanced course” to help officers — who have no personal experience with cannabis — recognize the signs of a different type of impairment.
It’s a common question for states that legalize marijuana, and the potential increase of driving and boating under the influence is always a point of contention from opponents of legalization.
Klump had been hosting “wet labs” for about 10 years, and in 2016, had the idea that a similar experience with cannabis would also be highly valuable.
“I went, ‘Wait a minute, with weed being legal in Washington, why not apply the same concepts for safety?’” Klump says. “Nobody had done it in the country at that time.”
The volunteer purchased their own cannabis, consumed in private and then was brought in with the rest of the volunteers who had been consuming alcohol. But after Klump’s cannabis volunteer had been discovered, the officers in the training all agreed on the value of having them there.
“They go, ‘Holy cow, we’ve never experienced anything like this,’” Klump says with a laugh.
The following year, Klump decided to again include cannabis as part of the training, but knew he needed more volunteers, so he reached out to the industry and found plenty of partners willing to supply volunteers and product.
“We can’t do it without the assistance and respect of the industry,” says Klump, who noted the “respect” and “professionalism” of those he met with. “They have a big interest in safe cannabis use.”
He also teamed with Dr. Nick Lovrich, a regency professor emeritus at Washington State University’s School of Politics, Philosophy and Public Affairs. Lovrich had received a federal grant to study the impacts of legalization on police, prosecutors and courts. In the first years of his study, nearly every police officer Lovrich spoke to was not only trained to recognize people under the influence of alcohol, but were also generally familiar with alcohol and its effects. However, they had little to no experience with cannabis or even with people who used it.
“Cannabis impairment is not the same as alcohol and the behaviors are very different,” Lovrich says. “The tools they (police) have aren’t very good.”
After hearing about the green labs from officers he was interviewing, Lovrich contacted Klump and the pair decided to team up to collect data from the volunteers and the officers to help learn as much about cannabis intoxication as they could.
“It was fascinating the amount of care he put into thinking this through,” Lovrich says of Klump.
Smoke Signals
According to Klump and Lovrich, what they’ve learned over the course of several years and multiple green labs, as the trainings have come to be known, is that the roadside tests police rely on to determine whether to take the next step in an investigation — be it a breathalyzer for alcohol or a blood test for cannabis — work better for whiskey than weed.
Officers are trained to watch for points where people may be wobbly during a heel-toe walk or what a drunk person’s eyes might do when following a moving finger or being unable to balance and touch their nose.
“Those things are less effective in judging someone’s impairment from cannabis. They can do those tasks, but they still are not able to drive a car safely,” Lovrich says, adding that more emphasis should be placed on other tests and observations when testing for cannabis use.
For example, a suspect on cannabis may be able to balance with their head tilted back, but because cannabis causes some confusion in a user’s sense of timing, asking them to stand back up after 30 seconds and seeing how close they get may be more effective. Or, for example, knowing to watch a person’s eyelids while they try to touch their nose with their eyes closed.
“When they do the finger to nose, you’re looking at their eyelids, and if their eyelids are trembling like crazy — because they can’t control that — that would be something for the officer to file in their mind that you may be looking at cannabis,” Klump says.
Both Klump and Lovrich say the feedback from police has been phenomenal, with all involved saying the green labs provide valuable lessons and insight.
“The feedback was just over the top,” Klump says. “Officers were like, ‘This has to be standard for all police training.’”
Lovrich notes that at the most recent lab he attended, all 15 participants filled out surveys praising the training.
“They said this should be part of ARIDE training,” Lovrich says. However, every mention of what they learned from the program were scrubbed from his 158-page report because of an objection from the National Highway Safety Commission, which supports the Drug Recognition Expert program, in which trained officers request an expert, which can often take hours to get to the suspect, allowing the THC in their system to metabolize.
An Evolving Science
With Lovrich publishing his paper and Klump moving on to a new role during the pandemic, the future of the green lab program in Washington is unknown, but the idea has already spread.
Lovrich and Klump were both contacted by multiple agencies from outside the state, many of which sent representatives to watch the events, including the Houston Police Department and the state of Colorado, which has set up a similar program. Lovrich says though they were once controversial, the National Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and National Sherriff’s Association have since endorsed green lab training and many organizations have set up versions of the training in their jurisdictions.
“Officers think it’s essential, it’s important and should be done more often,” Lovrich says, noting that prosecutors have come to realize that an officer’s training when it comes to judging impairment is “often essential” when it comes to building a case. “More states are likely to see the writing on the wall.”
“We don’t have good enough training in this field,” says Klump, noting once again the help from the industry itself and the volunteers who the police were could talk to and learn from during the events.
“And the information that I learned from them was just amazing,” he says. “The experience has been phenomenal really.”