In the debate leading up to November’s vote legalizing marijuana, law enforcement officials warned that traffic cops had no equivalent to a Breathalyzer to prove drug impairment in drivers.

“With marijuana, it’s much more difficult to make the arrest and if we do make the arrest, the chance of conviction is lower,” Norwood Police Chief William G. Brooks III, president of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association, said before Question 4’s victory at the polls.

But in fact, police departments around the country, including 63 in Massachusetts, are employing a different way to catch drivers impaired by marijuana or other drugs.

An extensive training course, known as the Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) program, provides officers certified training to run suspect drivers through a 12-step test to determine if they were driving under the influence of drugs.

Retired Marblehead Sgt. Donald Decker has been a certified DRE for 21 years, and is now the Massachusetts state coordinator of the program that has grown statewide and nationally.

“It is highly effective, and it has expanded tremendously,” he said. “When I got my certification in 1995, there were less than half of the states running the program.”

Developed in the 1970s by Los Angeles traffic enforcement officers, the DRE program, now overseen by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, has trained 4,000 officers in 36 states and the District of Columbia, including 126 Massachusetts officers.

To receive DRE certification, officers go through two weeks of classroom training in Massachusetts, learning how to detect and identify the presence of drugs in a person.

Once officers finish they often go to Maricopa County, Arizona, to complete the practical portion of certification — looking for evidence of drug use among volunteer inmates who have recently been brought in to the jail for processing.

“We do them in Maricopa County because they’re one of the biggest intake facilities in the country,” Decker said.

DRE-trained police are called in after an officer stops a driver suspected of being impaired and a breath test rules out alcohol as a cause.

The DRE officer then performs a 12-step evaluation at the police department to determine if the driver is under the influence of drugs.

“One of the interesting things about the DRE process is that it’s not done on the streets. There’s always a post-arrest evaluation, then the DRE comes to the police station or whatever facility to conduct his examination,” said Decker.

The first step is to establish if impairment is due to medical reasons. If the driver appears to have an overt medical problem, such as a diabetic emergency or a stroke, the arresting officer will send him to the hospital.

If the impairment appears to be drug-related, the DRE performs a series of examinations: taking the pulse three separate times, looking at pupil size, muscle tone, and checking for injection sites.

Beyond testing a driver for drug impairment, the process also tries to identify what category of drugs is involved. Once DREs perform these evaluations and make an arrest, they are typically asked to testify in court to provide an expert opinion.

The program has passed its own test in various research studies.

A 1984 Johns Hopkins University study found that Los Angeles DRE officers could accurately distinguish between the drug and non-drug impairment. A 1985 study sponsored by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that DREs were very successful in identifying drug-impaired individuals in actual on-the-street actions.

The DRE program also has passed the legal test; courts have upheld the admissibility of DRE evidence in California, New York, Arizona, Minnesota, Colorado and Florida. The Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office estimated that 95 percent of those charged with driving under the influence of drugs are convicted.

Decker said Massachusetts officers do very well, with their assessments confirmed 90 percent of the time by toxicology tests.

The programs is also a good deal for an officer with DRE certification. Mark Leahy, the executive director of the Massachusetts Chiefs of Police, called DREs a “hot commodity” for their own departments and neighboring agencies.

“Typically you’ll be called upon by the towns that surround you, and perhaps the towns that surround your neighbors, to make your officer available to go out and assist them to perform the actual roadside testing of these folks,” Leahy said.

The program is funded through federal grants, which cover the cost of training and travel to Arizona. The only costs local departments have to cover are that of backfills, the money they must pay to replace officers who are away at training.

“It’s a very small expense, and whatever that expense is, it’s well worth it to get a stoned driver off the road,” said Dave Procopio, a spokesman for Massachusetts State Police.

Despite the success, Leahy said departments still need a test for marijuana and other drugs that would be equivalent to a Breathalyzer. Most drug use needs to be confirmed by blood tests; in the case of marijuana, levels of the active ingredient THC can remain in the blood for weeks after use.

“The DRE program is a wonderful thing, but we desperately need to have an objective, quantifiable method to measure THC in a person’s system,” Leahy said. “As great as the DREs are, they’re probably still going to be scrutinized in court by a defense attorney who’s going to claim that it was his interpretation of how someone appeared.”

But Procopio believes the science behind DRE evaluations is sufficient to make a strong case in the court of law.

“They can testify based on their training and experience,” he said. “I would dispute the fact that there’s no science behind it because there is science that narcotics produces certain physiological signs in a person, and they are trained to identify and recognize them.”

Decker said DREs can have an importance that goes beyond catching drug-impaired drivers.

“We do programs for schoolteachers and nurses because there are so many students that go to school under the influence of marijuana,” he said. “We do this so these kids can get the help they need, not so that we get the police involved.”

Oriana Durand is a student reporter for the Boston University State House program.

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