HYDERABAD / DELHI: The two joints of hash Binay Singh had with his friends at his Greater Kailash house in Delhi last Saturday seemed especially potent to him.It was late by the time the party broke and Binay (not his real name) had to drop one of his friends to Gurugram. Midway, Singh slowed his car to almost 30 km an hour, the high from the hashish getting to him. At a police ‘naka’ near Chanakyapuri, cops stopped him. “I was very scared,” Binay later said. “They asked me why I was driving so slow. I told them I was feeling unwell. They sniffed around and couldn’t smell alcohol. They let me go but it was a close shave.”It took a long time for police in Indian cities to get the mechanism to catch drunk drivers . Now, as driving under the influence of illegal and prescription drugs rises, police find themselves behind on the tech curve once again, with no mechanism in place to catch drug users at the wheel.Cannabis, LSD, MDMA or Ecstasy, hashish and cocaine are among the drugs being seized in the city. But the only way to detect narcotic traces in a driver is through a blood sample. We can only book someone if found in possession of drugs, or buying it or in the act of consuming it,” said K Pavan Kumar, assistant excise superintendent, enforcement wing of Telangana prohibition and excise department.Road safety experts pointed out that even legal drugs prescribed by doctors to treat common medical conditions affect the performance of the driver. “Amphetamines used to treat hyperactivity or obesity impact a driver’s performance. According to WHO, the risk of a fatal crash among those who have used amphetamines is five times higher than among non-users,” said Vinod K Kanumala, CEO of Indian Federation of Road Safety.Till June this year, Delhi Police caught 1.5 lakh drunk drivers. Drug users, though, are a different matter. “We can detect drugusing drivers visually, or through smell. They can be booked under the Narcotics, Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act,” said Alok Kumar, Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Delhi.Without technology, police can do very little to catch drug users during checks. “Currently, we can only seek a test of narcotics content in the system of a person if he is involved in an accident,” said Anil Kumar, Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic), Hyderabad.The window of time to detect the drug while driving is very small, since the drug gets absorbed in the bloodstream soon after consumption, officers said. (With inputs from Somreet Bhattacharya in New Delhi, Sanjeev Verma and Pawan Tiwari in Chandigarh and Nitasha Natu in Mumbai)