The Sniffer

The National Transportation Safety Board’s recommendation that states lower their per se blood alcohol concentrations for impaired driving from 0.08 to 0.05 grabbed headlines last week. But the BAC reduction wasn’t NTSB’s only recommendation.  Overlooked in the 0.05 hullabaloo was NTSB’s endorsement of the Sniffer. That’s right.  The Sniffer.  It’s more powerful than a nose. Let me explain. The second recommendation in the NTSB’s report—immediately following the BAC bombshell—is high visibility enforcement of DWI laws. High visibility enforcement involves well-publicized media campaigns (think, Booze it and Lose it), visible enforcement efforts such as saturation patrols and sobriety checkpoints, and swift and certain penalties for drivers arrested for DWI (a la civil license revocations under G.S. 20-16.5). Checkpoints, however, have some limitations. And that’s where the Sniffer comes in. Turns out that a lot of folks who are impaired by alcohol aren’t detected even when stopped by a checkpoint. The NTSB report cites studies showing that officers employing traditional methods of determining driver impairment at a sobriety checkpoint identify less than half of all drivers with BACs above the per se limit. (NTSB at 25). So the NTSB recommends that officers use passive alcohol sensors (the Sniffer is the brand name for one such sensor), which can tip them off to the presence of alcohol. These sensors, housed James-Bond-style in a flashlight or a clipboard, detect alcohol vapor. When a police officer holds the Sniffer near a driver, it samples the driver’s exhaled breath as well as the air in the car, [...]