On July 1, the new law will take effect in several states in the United States. A Tennessee law would make suspicion of opioid impairment sufficient to establish evidence of drunk driving.
In August 2023, Ben Kredich was hit and killed when a car suddenly veered off the road. The driver, Shannon Walker, apparently passed out while driving while under the influence of opioids. In April, a grand jury indicted Walker on charges including vehicular homicide, driving under the influence and possession of a controlled substance.
Earlier in the day, Walker was found unconscious in a car. First responders administered naloxone, a drug that can reverse an opioid overdose, and rushed Walker to the hospital. He was released from the hospital about 90 minutes after police first discovered him. The hospital later issued a statement claiming Walker “left the hospital as a passenger in the vehicle, not the driver.” Less than an hour after Walker left the hospital, Credich was shot and killed.
In May, Republican Gov. Bill Lee signed the Ben Credidge Act into law. The bill states that “to prove that a person violated a state law related to drunk driving, evidence is required that the person was suspected of driving under the influence…and that an opioid antagonist was administered within 24 hours before the alleged violation.” used in an opioid-related overdose to presume that the defendant’s ability to drive was sufficiently impaired by the substance that caused the opioid-related overdose to constitute a violation of state law.
In other words, if a person suspected of suffering an opioid overdose takes naloxone, for the next 24 hours, the law presumes they are too unfit to drive. But is this good science?
“I think the 24-hour limit is arbitrary,” said Jeffrey Singer, a practicing physician and senior fellow at the Cato Institute. “A lot depends on the patient’s metabolism, renal function, other drugs in the system, and tolerance levels. For example, many chronic pain patients who are maintained on fairly high doses of opioids are alert, fully functional, and able to take narcotics. Ketones disappear in 30 to 90 minutes, and oxycodone has a half-life of approximately 3 hours, so it is entirely conceivable that a patient taking naloxone could be fully functional and no longer impaired in less than 24 hours.
“This one-size-fits-all approach is not evidence-based and puts many conscious acute and chronic pain patients or patients at risk,” Singer said. reason.
Credidge’s death was tragic and Walker probably did deserve to go to jail. But unfortunately, passing a law to address previous tragedies is all too common.
“Bills named after sympathetic victims are the worst form of knee-jerk legislation,” attorney Ted Frank wrote in 2016. “Crimes or incidents that clearly require new laws are by definition rare. of an incident, usually a high-profile tragedy, where multiple existing laws already criminalize violence, so the new law will usually try to close some glaring loophole, but it almost always goes overboard and creates more problems than There are more problems to be solved.
