It is one thing to operate a car or other passenger vehicle under the influence of drugs or alcohol, but it is quite another to drive a commercial vehicle in that condition. This is especially true if you are a truck driver. Think about how much larger a commercial semi truck is than your average car. They’re not called the kings of the road for nothing.
On top of just being a large sized vehicle, a truck also needs more time to brake and that requires a driver who has great reflexes. Since drinking alcohol or consuming drugs can impair reflexes, the driver is then considered to be impaired. If you consider what can happen if a fully loaded truck can cause in terms of damages if it just lightly bumps into a car, then you don’t want to know what can happen if it slammed at full speed into the same car! It is not a pretty sight, to put it mildly.
The current federal law makes a truck driver’s alcohol BAC level a 0.04 and if a truck driver does he is now considered to be legally impaired. When you think about the size of a commercial vehicle versus an average sized car this is acceptable and warranted and has aided in reducing accidents in recent years.
There is a common problem among truck drivers. They have such unrealistic deadlines to keep that they fell the need to use drugs such as stimulants and marijuana to keep them awake to meet deadlines or face the possibility of being fired by the company they work for. This is dangerous since they can impair the same as alcohol. Some resort to getting meth which is said to be quite easy to find at truck stops. The blame is hard to put on one and is most likely shared between truckers and demanding schedules from the company.
One helpful policy is when truckers receive a commercial drivers license a stipulation is that they must consent to random drug testing no matter what they are doing at the time. If they are summoned to the supervisor’s office they must report there. They face termination or fines from the company should they refuse or not show up as there are no grounds to refuse.
This is always a situation that is serious enough that it will have to be looked further into. It is even more serious than a normal DWI, because of the number of lives potentially at stake. Every driver of a passenger car who has to drive next to a semi truck will want some sort of assurance that they are safe and that the truck driver won’t be suffering some problems, like flashback to a war he was in, just because he had took some substance to help remain awake.
If you are the driver of a truck, then remember to stay safe. Get the sleep that you need and don’t give in to temptation. There are a lot of lives at stake on the road, and it’s partly your job to make sure that they stay safe.
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