The common belief among many drivers is that a driving under the influence charge only has to do with the use of alcohol or hard drugs. The legal fact in the state of Georgia, however, is much larger and is usually thrown in the teeth of law abiding citizens. You can be charged and tried to the full extent of the laws of driving after consuming your prescription drugs which are legally prescribed or even common drugs available over the counter. This particular offense is referred to as driving under the influence less safe. Due to the baffling nature of this law, it is critical to seek the services of an informed Atlanta DUI Attorney in case you are charged with merely taking the medicine prescribed by your doctor.
The gist of the less safe statute is that a person is not allowed to drive a motor vehicle when any substance impairs his/her driving abilities. This implies that there is no definite limit in law or blood concentration figure that automatically causes conviction as is the case with alcohol. Instead, police officers base their judgments on their personal observations of how you drive, how you look and how you pass field sobriety tests. An officer is allowed to arrest you when they think that your prescribed anxiety drug, ADHD treatment or even a high dosage of allergy medication has affected your reaction time or motor capabilities. The only way to combat these subjective assumptions is having an experienced DUI Attorney Atlanta who is known to be able to dismantle the personal views of an officer in a court of law.
The case involving prescription medication takes a totally different approach to defense as compared to the typical alcohol related case. The prescription pills will not be detected in a breathalyzer test, so the state will frequently need blood tests and testimony of drug recognition experts. Such professionals are officers who have undergone training in order to detect the impairment caused by different types of drugs, yet their approach is not flawless and in most cases very vulnerable to cross-examination. Having Atlanta DUI Attorney James Yeargan of Yeargan and KERT LLC on your side, your defense team can even put up a systematic defiance of the scientific validity of the blood testing processes and the particular training of the arresting officers. It requires remarkable legal experience to establish that the level of a drug in your system was therapeutic, and it did not necessarily correspond to driving impairment.
The most annoying part of defending the defendants in such cases is that they feel like they are being punished because they are taking care of their health. You could have been using the very amount of medication that your doctor prescribed to you over the years with no problems before. Sadly, possession of a valid prescription is not a blanket defense to a less safe charge. The prosecution will say that the warning labels on your pill bottle clearly state that you are not to use heavy machinery, which in this case is your personal vehicle. An experienced DUI Lawyer Atlanta will deal with this by proving that you have developed a tolerance to the drug and possibly enlisting some medical professionals to testify to the actual effect of the drug on your particular biology.
The repercussions of a prescription drug conviction are equally as high as those of alcohol, such as the suspension of license, hefty fines and probation. Never assume that the prosecutor or the judge will be kind to you because you took medication that was legal. The state considers any kind of impaired driving a grave menace to the safety of the people. When you are arrested with your prescribed medicine, then you should approach the situation with the highest level of urgency. With the help of an experienced Atlanta DUI Lawyer to develop a stringent, science based defense, you stand the best chance of saving your driving privileges and avoiding an otherwise devastating criminal conviction on your permanent record.
