IMMORTAL Project
IMMORTAL (Impaired Motorists, Methods of Roadside Testing and Assessment for Licensing) was a special EU research programme to investigate the influence of chronic and acute impairment in order to make a more accurate risk assessment and to provide key information to support EU Policy on licensing and roadside testing. The IMMORTAL consortium comprised ten partners from a range of European institutions with multi-disciplinary expertise. The Project was granted by the European commission DG TREN under the Transport RTD programme of the 5th Framework Programme.
The project started in 2002 and has been finished in 2005. KfV (Austrian Road Safety Board) has been leading the work package concerning dissemination and exploitation results and produced a state of the art report on alcohol, illicit drugs, medicines and driver impairment.
The results should be incorporated when updating the EU-Directive on driving licences dealing with minimum standards of physical and mental fitness for driving a power-driven vehicle.
The highlights of IMMORTAL
Concerning the prevalence of psychoactive drugs, there are indications by the IMMORTAL research that the proportion of drugged drivers has increased and that mixed consumption has become more frequent.
Furthermore, prosecution of DUI is urgently needed in case of alcohol especially for drivers with high BACs, and drivers with combinations of drugs and alcohol and more than one drug.
Legal framework for both prosecution and further research is important and still has to be established in some European countries.
Concerning illness and diseases, it became apparent that the degree of impairment not only differs depending on the medical condition, but also may clearly vary individually. Individual compensation abilities can be crucial factors in the context of assessing the fitness to drive. The consequences should be: (1) To measure the identified, especially risky medical conditions and (2) To assess individually to which extent driving fitness exists (possibility of compensation). For the assessment, both medical and psychological variables have turned out to be relevant.
Regarding the intervention methods, frequent Random Breath Testing and Alcolocks are promising measures. A drug recognition method tested in the context of IMMORTAL still needs further improvement, also the saliva test devices seemed yet to be error-prone. Since it turned out that the combination of alcohol and drugs and the combined consumption of different drugs have increased, it is vital that, besides impairment by alcohol, also the impairment by drugs is recorded. This means that alongside Random breath test devices, also good screening instruments should be available to clarify the impairment by drugs. Concerning licensing procedures, consistent, reliable, and valid standards are sought after. Here, work can be continued on the basis of the findings of the odds ratios of medical conditions.
- Target group-specific proceeding is also recommended on the basis of the IMMORTAL results.
- Medical expertise turned out to be an important contact that on one hand practitioners should be informed about the specific effects of medicines on driving performance (see e.g. IMMORTAL research concerning cold medication, depression and diabetes) and on the other hand has to relay this information to the patients.
- For illegal drugs that are taken alone, and with the exception of heroin, zero-tolerance legislation would, however, seem to result in very high costs and hardly any road safety benefits. For most medicinal drugs, like antidepressants, benzodiazepines, codeine, barbiturates and even morphine, therapeutic levels may be adequate as legal limits, at least for the time being.
