The European Integrated Project DRUID (Driving Under the Influence of Drugs, Alcohol and Medicines) is a part of the 6th Framework Program, the European Community Framework Program for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration. The objective of DRUID is to give scientific support to the EU transport policy by providing a solid basis to generate harmonised, EU-wide regulations for driving under the influence of alcohol, drugs and medicine. This study is a part of Work Package 2, Epidemiology, of the DRUID project. The objective of the study is to assess the situation in Europe regarding the prevalence of alcohol and other psychoactive substances in drivers who have been injured/killed in traffic accidents. The present study was conducted in four European countries (Germany, Lithuania, Hungary and Slovakia) in order to evaluate and compare the relative risks among fatally injured drivers responsible for a fatal traffic accident when driving under the influence of alcohol and/or other psychoactive substances. In the respective countries this was in many ways a pilot project where data material and blood samples of traffic fatalities were utilized systematically for accident analysis. Originally the analysis of retrospective Swedish data was planned for the study; however, it turned out that the initial inclusion criteria were not suitable for further analysis in the responsibility study. In-depth analysis of accidents of killed drivers with a positive toxicological test in Germany and Lithuania was carried out with the purpose of analyzing the contribution of human failure patterns under influence to accident causation. Furthermore the sampled data was to provide an insight into the proportion of drivers under the influence of psychoactive substances among fatally injured drivers in those four different European countries and the substances used. (Author/publisher) This document is available at https://www.bast.de/Druid/EN/Home/home_node.html
Abstract