A shot of drugs in a shot glass.
Under Pennsylvania law, it is illegal to operate a motor vehicle while under the influence of a drug such that it impairs your ability to safely drive. While the statute is silent on what exactly under the influence and impaired means in relation to the consumption of drugs, Pennsylvania case law has established that the presence of metabolites in the blood shows ingestion of a drug and, in some cases, the ingestion of a drug is all that is needed to show impairment.
Identification
Under Pennsylvania case law, a metabolite is defined to mean the residue or trace elements of a drug that has been ingested. For example, if you take an aspirin for a headache, the chemical trace or metabolite of the aspirin might remain in your body for some time after your headache went away.
Function
Case law also holds that the presence of a drug metabolite in your blood is an accurate indication that you have ingested the drug. However, case law goes on to say that while metabolites show ingestion, they are not accurate indicators of when the drug was consumed, how much of the drug was consumed and whether the drug impaired your ability to operate a motor vehicle.
Significance
The presence of metabolites for some drugs, such as marijuana, in a driver without evidence that he was under the influence of the drug or that his ingestion of the drug impaired his ability to operate a motor vehicle at the time that he was stopped is insufficient to convict him of DUI.
Considerations
The principle behind the case law is that the metabolites for some drugs can stay in the body for weeks or months and therefore play no role in how a driver is operating a car today. Similarly, the court found that the effects of some prescription drugs are not common to all people and that simply having the metabolites of a drug in your system is not an accurate or fair indication, without expert testimony showing that the metabolites in your body at the time you were stopped were sufficient to render you impaired.
Warning
However, Pennsylvania case law holds that if the metabolite shows consumption of a illegal drug such as cocaine, then you may also be charged with a DUI even if their is no testimony or evidence that your ability to drive was impaired in any way. Under this case law, the court held that the intoxicating effects of some drugs, like cocaine, are so well known that proof of impairment is redundant.
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