Driving with prescribed medication

Request Number: FOI/16337

Category: Organisational Information & Performance - Policies

Subject: Driving with prescribed medication

Request and Answer:
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Question 1
Please provide the following information relating to the enforcement of Sections 4(1) and 4(2) of the Road Traffic Order (NI) 1995 in cases involving drivers who are prescribed medical cannabis or other potentially impairing prescription medications.

PSNI policy or internal guidance for dealing with drivers who hold a lawful prescription for a cannabis-based product for medicinal use (CBPM).

Question 2
Any operational instructions, training materials, briefing documents, or officer guidance relating to:

a. assessing impairment where a driver is prescribed cannabis;
b. the status of THC found in blood where the substance is lawfully prescribed;
c. how officers should approach possession of prescribed cannabis in a vehicle.

Question 3
Procedures or criteria used by officers to determine impairment for drivers taking prescription medication, including cannabis, benzodiazepines, opiates, or other sedating medicines.

Question 4
Copies of FIT/impairment testing protocols, including specific instructions for cases involving prescribed drugs.

Question 5
Any PSNI documents or communications outlining whether a prescription affects the decision to arrest, require a medical examination, or require a blood sample.

Question 6
Statistics (last 5 years) for arrests or charges under Sections 4(1) or 4(2) where the driver had a valid prescription for:
a. medical cannabis;
b. other controlled prescription drugs.

Answer
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;
(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;
(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be:

• made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
• made for the same or similar information; and
• received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

In regards to Question 6, PSNI can confirm that while we do hold this information electronically, it is not held in an easily retrievable format. Unfortunately we can advise that PSNI's statistics do not hold the relevant figures for Question 6 - this information would be held within the figures for 'drink/drug driving arrests.'

In order to retrieve the requested information for this question would require a manual trawl through these incidents to determine if medical cannabis or other prescription drugs were involved. We can further advise that for the years 2022 - 2024 alone, there were over 9000 arrests for drink/drug driving. Even if it took as little as 1 minute to examine a single incident, this would still amount to over 150 hours work - vastly exceeding the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. PSNI can advise that we can answer Questions 1 - 5, if a newly refined request is submitted. We are unable to answer Question 6 due to the way the information is held, as explained above. However, we can offer the figures for drink/drug driving for those 5 years instead if this is useful.

Submission of a refined request would be treated as a new request, and considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including consideration of relevant Part II exemptions.