The drug recognition expert, commonly abbreviated as DRE, is a program that consists of a series of tests that enable the establishment of drug impairment in people. The program was a result of clinical and psychophysical examinations that were developed and tested for trained police officers in the event of identifying and differentiating drug impairment forms. The program has become a national program in the United States, where police officers are trained to be drug recognition experts. The DRE program is characterized by the incorporation of standardized means of determining whether a suspect has taken one or more drugs. In addition to determining whether a suspect has taken one or more drugs, the program incorporates a method of differentiating what drugs a suspect has taken, especially when they have taken more than one drug (Saferstein, 2011). The DRE program has both strengths and weaknesses, thus the need to explore them to prevent ineffectiveness of the program.
The DRE program evaluation programs consist of a standard drug influence evaluation form, which every police officer completes to determine whether they are competent in the same in close to 40 minutes. The DRE program process can be used in the determining of whether a suspect has taken certain drugs. The drugs include cannabis, hallucinogens, central nervous system stimulants, inhalants, central nervous system depressants, dissociative anesthetics, and narcotic analgesics (Saferstein, 2011). However, the DRE program is not in place to substitute toxicological tests.
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Strengths of the DRE program include the fact that it equips police officer with the ability to determine whether a suspect is under the influence of drugs. This is beneficial because it prevents such people from being or roads or endangering the lives of those around them. A strength of the program is that it can enable the establishment of rampant drugs within a particular area or state since it helps in the establishment of what drug a person has taken. Upon establishing such patterns, the police force can focus on battling a drug that is tested in most of the people, thus making the country safe from drugs (Saferstein, 2011). Another strength of the program is that its process enables the testing of several drugs at the same time, hence it is hard for the police to miss on what drugs a person is on, and thus ensuring drug abusers do not go unnoticed.
Some of the weakness of the DRE program includes the fact that specific signs that DREs look for may be caused by things other than drugs, making the program flawed. For instance, one of the things that DREs look for is dilated pupils, which can be attributed to numerous medical reasons such as sexual arousal, as well as excitement. Therefore, by using the sign of a dilated pupil to determine whether a person is n drugs can be unreliable and ineffective if the reason for the dilated pupils is not related to drug use. Another weakness of the DRE program is that some of the steps of the process are flawed and thus cannot necessarily be used in the evaluation and determination of the presence of drugs in a suspect’s system (Emler, 1989). For instance, the second step of the process, interview the officer, can be characterized with bias owing to the evaluation of a situation subjectively as opposed to basing it on empiricism, thus a weakness of the program.
References
Emler, Donald G. Revisioning the Dre . Birmingham, Ala: Religious Education Press, 1989. Print.
Saferstein, R. (2011). Criminalistics . An introduction to Forensic Science . Pearson Education.
