Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse Approaches Phase Two
At the advent of 2020, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration released the Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse, a database to track commercial drivers with a record of using substances on the road that could adversely impact their driving abilities, or at the very least track when they refuse a testing request from an officer. Now, the FMCSA is upgrading the Clearinghouse in how it interacts with state agencies.
Details
The news comes from a final rule published in the Federal Register in late 2021. The short version of the regulation is that the Clearinghouse will communicate with the State Driver’s Licensing Agency (SDLA) of all fifty states to communicate when a driver has an outstanding violation in the Clearinghouse, upon which the SDLA must revoke the CDL of the driver in question, which will be reinstated once the driver has completed the “return-to-duty” training. This makes it significantly harder to allow a violating driver behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle due to a lack of communication.
This is similar to closing a loophole, and will have no effect on drivers in good standing but will make it harder for violators to avoid return-to-duty training if they want to get behind the wheel again. State and federal enforcement will work more closely together to make sure that violators stay off the road or pay increased punishments not only for inappropriately driving a commercial vehicle, but doing so without a proper license.
Conclusion
The regulation goes into effect November 18th, at which point in time an estimated 177,000 drivers are at risk of having their CDLs put into a temporary suspension status.
This is not the first time that the FMCSA has updated its regulations regarding the Clearinghouse in order to make it operate as intended; in March 2023 the FMCSA closed a loophole that gave new employee applicants a grace period of not having their prospective employer know about a recent violation. All of this is done in pursuit of the FMCSA’s herculean goal of zero commercial vehicle crash deaths in a year, which currently stands at approximately 5,000 based on the latest data from 2021.
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