Police arrested a taxi driver who confessed to smoking heroin while behind the wheel of her vehicle in Washington after she was spotted by authorities.
A firefighter allegedly witnessed the unidentified driver of the taxi smoking a black substance from some tinfoil with the vehicle in motion. Police responding to the call tracked the taxi down to the parking lot of a tavern in Port Orchard, Washington. The officer asked the woman if she was using methamphetamine after noticing a circular burn mark on her lip, reports Kitsap Sun.
The woman admitted to the officer that she was smoking heroin and had been driving while high on the substance. Officers searching her car and found drug paraphernalia and a substance they suspect is heroin.
Cases of people using and overdosing on heroin while driving are becoming more frequent in communities hit hard by opioid addiction. A man overdosed behind the wheel in North Carolina Jan. 23, drifting across the centerline in the road before wrecking in an embankment. His 14-month-old son was in the car but escaped unscathed.
The situation is causing a threat to public safety, exemplified in a near-tragedy Jan. 20 in New York, when a man driving high on heroin narrowly avoided crashing into a daycare center.
“He was less than a mile from his house, drove past the elementary school zone, got past that okay, then drifted off the road and knocked down a telephone pole that was across the street from a daycare center,” James VanBrederode, police chief in Gates, N.Y., told WHEC in January. “You can see the potential problems this causes and that’s at 10:00 a.m.”
Authorities suspect many heroin addicts are use the drug in an area away from their home and attempt to drive back, creating fatal risks for themselves and anyone on the road.
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