The inquiry’s report was presented to parliament this week with 50 recommendations, including investigating drug driver regimes all over the world with a view to updating policing policies in Victoria.

Police in Victoria can only detect cannabis, methamphetamine and MDMA in drivers, and there is no threshold – such as 0.05 for alcohol – to determine a driver’s level of impairment.

Specific thresholds exist in Norway and the Netherlands, and for cannabis in Colorado and California. These regimes were investigated as part of the inquiry.

As medicinal cannabis becomes increasingly accessible in Victoria, the inquiry found that drug driving laws would need to be updated.

The report stated that more research was needed into impairment levels.

“The Committee acknowledges that without a better understanding of how individual substances effect impairment, their direct contribution to fatal and serious injury crashes, in comparison to other risk factors, remains unknown,” the report reads.

“Stakeholders also advised the Committee that moving away from a drug detection threshold to an impairment threshold would facilitate the inclusion of other drugs in the testing regime, including pharmaceutical drugs, some of which are proven to adversely affect driving performance.”

Other recommendations included looking into jurisdictions that regulate the use of recreational cannabis to reduce the scale and scope of the illicit drug market.

The report also recommended expanding the number of Drug Courts, establish drug testing units at events, evaluate the effectiveness of drug sniffer dogs and develop better guidelines for the prescription of opioids.

A shift towards treating drug issues as health matters – rather than criminal matters – was also recommended.

Bendigo GP Regina Clark has provided care for people with HIV and hepatitis, and provides an opiate substitution program for people with a drug addiction.

She made a submission to the inquiry, agreeing that drug issues needed to be treated with health policy, rather than criminal policy.

“It has been obvious in my 30 years that current policy criminalises what is really a medical condition,” Dr Clark wrote.

“This leads to increased harm physically, mentally, legally and financially.

“It is time to develop a new approach to helping those with drug problems.”

The state government has six months to respond to the report.