Drug Driving Lawyer Melbourne

As drug driving lawyers who are focussed solely on defending driving charges, we don’t defend murder cases, sexual assault cases or fraud. In fact, over 99% of our work is traffic law and defending driving charges. We have represented over 5500 drivers charged with various traffic offences. We have been doing these cases since 2006.

As we don’t need to know or study other areas of law, just driving offences, we spend all of our time in court and in the office laser focussed on defending driving charges such as drink drive and drug charges.

New Laws on Driving on Cannabis with a Prescription

There is new legislation which came into effect on the 1st March 2025. Losing your licence for this type of drug driving is no longer mandatory. Section 50(1)(F) of the Road Safety Act 1986 contains the new legislation. This new law has already helped our clients who were caught driving with cannabis in their system and had a medical prescription for it. None of them have lost their licence. See Case Studies relating to Drug Driving cases below.

Medicinal Cannabis with a Prescription

In 2016, Victoria introduced laws allowing doctors to prescribe medicinal cannabis for certain medical conditions. Unfortunately, it did not update the Road Safety Act 1986. That has led to a situation where people can legally use cannabis with THC, but they will then be fined or taken to Court for driving while the THC is still detectable resulting in a mandatory
loss of licence.

THC can stay in the system for weeks, meaning the medicinal cannabis users have had to make a decision about treating their medical condition with medicinal cannabis, or driving their car.

We have now done several cases under the new (2025) medicinal cannabis provisions. So far, we have retained each client’s licence. In order to convince the court that they should not take your licence for using medicinal cannabis, we require evidence of your patient card and a letter from your prescribing doctor confirming your prescription pre-dates the offence.

Serious consequences of failing to comply with a drug test

Whenever you are asked for a drug test, you should always provide it as the consequences of failing to provide it are far greater than if you provide a drug test and fail.

Defences

It is difficult, but not impossible, to defend a drug driving case. Each case turns on the facts. Some possible defences include:

1. You are not tested within three hours of driving;
2. You were not given an opportunity to respond to the request for the test ;
3. For an impairment, you were taking a prescription medication in accordance with the prescription. Even though you are impaired, it was only prescription medication that you are affected by. In those circumstances you can be found not guilty. The most common drug where this occurs is still Stilnox, which is a prescription sleeping tablet that can have side effects such as sleepwalking, sleep driving and hallucinations.

Example

A person is driving home from work. They are stopped at a booze bus. They passed the drink drive test but the police officer decides to give them a preliminary oral fluid test (POFT) to test for drugs. The person fails the preliminary oral fluid test, the police ask for an oral fluid sample which is sent to the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine for analysis. The results come back and show that the person has cannabis in their system. The person has a previous low level drink drive from nine years ago.

The result of this case would be that the driver loses their licence for 12 months.

Using the above example, the person fails the oral fluid test because he/she had been using medicinal cannabis for the previous four months.

We would obtain the evidence proving the prescription of medicinal cannabis prior to the oral fluid test.

At court, we would argue that even though the person was drug driving, they are entitled to the benefit of the new law (1 March 2025) that says the court does not have to cancel a licence where the only drug is medicinal cannabis. The court still has the power to cancel their licence, but it is not compulsory.

We would expect to get a fine of about $500 with no loss of license.

Using the first example with a person who fails the oral fluid test, they are charged and receive a brief of evidence to go to court. We review the certificates that show when the oral fluid was taken and how it was processed. On the certificate from the lab, they say that the sample was received, the barcode matched but the seal over the oral fluid vial was not intact.

We would negotiate with the prosecutor to say that the sample has the capacity to have been tampered with because it was not appropriately sealed. We have done several cases like this and have been successful on each occasion. That is, the charges were withdrawn against our client. We can only test this once we see the brief of evidence.