How Do Prescription Medications Affect Impaired By Alcohol Cases?

I have an interesting topic for you today. How do prescription medications affect impaired by alcohol cases? Very interesting. Let’s break it down this way. We all know that there’s certain prescription medications when they interact with alcohol can exacerbate the effects of alcohol. They don’t mix.  I’m talking about blood certain blood pressure pills, sleeping pills, opiates and things like this can exacerbate the effects. So for example, you might blow under the legal limit but still appear impaired. So that’s very important point. So under our Criminal Code, you could go back to police station below under the limit, or even a little bit over, but your impaired symptoms may be more severe because of the exacerbating effect. So it’s very important in these situations to have a lawyer look at this particular charge, because a lot of times they can be defended because, you know, you’ve got a situation where you can challenge the evidence of the police because you were on a prescription medication, there was no intent that you were going to be, you know, driving impaired, and maybe they’re, perhaps, for example, exaggerating the symptomology and also, you blew, say, under the legal limit even. So, there’s often defenses presented with prescription medications. It’s a very nuanced type thing, but know this, if you’re on prescription medications, you should obviously know what the effects are and don’t have alcohol with them. There’s usually warning labels, and that’s another thing that brings up, that if you are not warned, there may be some sort of defense you can use. But the bottom line is that many prescription cases that I’ve defended, where the police have tried to argue and the crown has tried to argue that they exacerbated the effects, we’ve won many of them, they have a toxicologist looking at the case, challenge the evidence of the police officer to minimize what their observations were and ultimately creating a reasonable doubt. 

There are other situations, of course, where you can and will get convicted when the prescription medication is really exacerbating the effect of the alcohol too much so that you’re stumbling, you can’t drive property, etc. And by the way, a common question that people ask me is, well, what about the breath reading? I blew say, 120 does the prescription medication increase the reading in any event? No, there’s no interaction that way. Your blood alcohol level is your blood alcohol level.  The real and only issue is whether the crown can prove that the interaction of the prescription medication and the level of alcohol you had created impaired symptoms that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that your ability to operate your motor vehicle is impaired by alcohol. Aside from that, hopefully, we can also attack the over 80 case because you’ve got to win both. They’re two separate charges impaired driving and blowing over the legal limit. But prescription medication cases present interesting challenges, a good lawyer could often win these type of cases for you though.