When 16 Hours Makes You an "Expert": How Courts Are Letting Undertrained Officers Testify About Drug Impairment
Nearly all police officers who work traffic enforcement receive drunk driving detection training through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's Standardized Field Sobriety Testing program, known as SFST. It is a 24-hour course that teaches officers how to administer three standardized roadside tests to drivers suspected of alcohol impairment. A select few go on to far more intensive training through the Drug Evaluation and Classification Program, which produces certified Drug Recognition Experts, or DREs.
Becoming a DRE is not easy, and it should not be. The process requires completion of a 16-hour pre-school, a 56-hour classroom course, and approximately 40 to 60 hours of supervised field certification. The entire process takes months and demands serious commitment. While I have significant criticisms of the DRE program as a whole, I will say this much in its favor: it is at least partially grounded in medical data and objective criteria that can be tested, challenged, and, when necessary, dismantled in a courtroom.
DREs conduct their evaluations in controlled environments, such as a police station or jail, following a structured 12-step protocol. Standardized field sobriety tests, by contrast, are administered roadside. The two programs operate in different contexts and serve different purposes.
Enter ARIDE — A Bridge Too Far
The Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement program, known as ARIDE, was developed by NHTSA and the International Association of Chiefs of Police to bridge the gap between the basic SFST battery and the full DRE evaluation process. Its stated purpose is to give officers a general introduction to drug impairment recognition, primarily so they know when to call a certified DRE for further evaluation. ARIDE is not a certification program. It is an introduction.
The entire ARIDE course takes 16 hours.
For context: if you watched the first two seasons of the Netflix series Stranger Things, you have spent approximately 16 hours with that show. That does not make you an expert on the show's mythology, and 16 hours of classroom instruction does not make a police officer an expert on drug impairment. The ARIDE program itself acknowledges this. Officers completing ARIDE are warned, repeatedly, that they are not certified DREs and are not permitted to offer opinions in court regarding drug classification or impairment.
That warning, as it turns out, does not always hold up in court.
ARIDE also introduces officers to roadside tests that go beyond the standard SFST battery. These additional tests have never been scientifically validated. They have no peer-reviewed research supporting their reliability or accuracy. They are, in short, tools that should never form the basis of a criminal conviction. But the temptation to use them exists, and I have been warning Michigan defense attorneys for some time that prosecutors may attempt to use ARIDE-trained officers to secure drug impairment convictions, even though those officers are explicitly prohibited from offering drug impairment opinions.
The Iowa Case That Should Alarm Every Defense Attorney
State v. Shannon, decided by the Iowa Court of Appeals in 2018, is exactly the kind of case I was worried about, and it is as troubling as it is instructive.
In Shannon, the prosecution presented testimony from ARIDE-trained officers — not certified DREs — to establish that the defendant was impaired by drugs. There was no confirmatory blood or urine testing. The conviction rested almost entirely on the observations and opinions of officers whose training consisted of that same 16-hour introduction course. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction, finding that the evidence was sufficient.
Let that sink in. A court held that 16 hours of basic classroom training qualifies a police officer to testify as an expert on drug impairment, in the absence of any laboratory confirmation.
It gets worse. Not only were the ARIDE officers unqualified to render drug impairment opinions under their own program's rules, they did not even administer the ARIDE tests correctly. Between the two officers, neither one completed a full ARIDE battery. Portions of the DRE 12-step process were introduced into evidence by officers who were never trained on those steps and who lacked even the most basic tools required to conduct them — including something as simple as a thermometer to measure body temperature.
To be clear about what happened in Shannon: an experienced, fully certified DRE who failed to follow proper protocols would have had his or her testimony excluded in nearly every court in the country. Yet in this case, two ARIDE officers who completed only a fraction of that training, administered their own program's tests incorrectly, and then borrowed pieces of a more advanced protocol they were never trained on, were allowed to offer expert opinions that resulted in a conviction.
What This Means for Michigan Drivers
Shannon is an Iowa decision. It is not binding in Michigan. But it illustrates a pattern I see in courtrooms across the country: judges and juries are quick to accept testimony that comes dressed in the language of science and expertise, even when it does not deserve that label. The prosecution benefits enormously from that presumption, and the defendant pays for it.
In Michigan, I challenge this kind of evidence aggressively. That means examining the officer's training records, the specific tests administered, whether protocols were followed, and whether the officer exceeded the scope of what their training actually permits them to say in court. An ARIDE officer who renders a drug impairment opinion has, in my view, offered testimony they are not qualified to give. A conviction that rests on unvalidated tests, administered incorrectly, by an undertrained officer, in the absence of confirmatory laboratory testing, is a conviction that should not stand.
If you or someone you know is facing a drug impairment charge based on field observations rather than confirmed laboratory results, the quality of the officer's training and the reliability of the tests they used are not minor details. They are the foundation of the case against you, and they need to be scrutinized accordingly.
