A breathalyzer able to determine if a driver smoked pot could roll out in select cities in the fall, according to a company developing the first-of-its-kind product.

With recreational weed now legal in nine states and the District of Columbia, California-based Hound Labs Inc. has created a marijuana-breathalyzer it says will make roads safer and hold drivers accountable. The company claims the device is hypersensitive, allowing it to pick up any THC — the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana — potentially present on drivers’ breath.

Currently, officers who suspect a driver is impaired can only test the hunch with field sobriety tests. Blood, breath or urine samples could be taken to determine if a driver is high, but such tests can be inaccurate. Those tests also detect if the driver was high that day or week, rather than if they were high while operating the vehicle in that instance.

“The Hound breathalyzer is 1 billion times more sensitive than today’s alcohol breathalyzers,” the company says on its site.

A 2017 survey by the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) found that almost 70 percent of cannabis consumers drove high at least once in the past year.  Twenty-seven percent said they drive high almost every day.

See the original article at USA Today