Most people know what a DUI looks like when alcohol is involved. Slurred speech, and a breath test comes back over the limit. Maybe you’ve seen the videos of drunk drivers failing roadside balance tests. The case is fairly straightforward.
Drugs are different.
There is no roadside machine that tells you a driver is impaired on meth, fentanyl, a prescription drug, or a combination of all three. A breath test can come back .000 and the person behind the wheel can still be impaired – pupils constricted or dilated, pulse elevated, muscle tone rigid or limp, unable to divide attention long enough to walk in a straight line. That driver is just as dangerous as a drunk. Sometimes more dangerous, because the signs are easier to miss if you have not been trained to see them.
That is what a Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) is for.
A DRE is a peace officer who has completed the national Drug Evaluation and Classification Program. Officers are specially trained to run a standardized, 12-step evaluation to determine three things:
That last point is important, because a DRE does not claim to name the exact pill or drug. Rather, the training is built around seven categories: CNS depressants, CNS stimulants, hallucinogens, dissociative anesthetics, narcotic analgesics, inhalants, and cannabis. The evaluation looks at eyes, vital signs, muscle tone, psychophysical tests, injection sites, and statements. Then toxicology either corroborates the opinion or it does not.
As of early 2026, Wyoming had 47 certified Drug Recognition Experts for the entire state.
In 2025, Wyoming DREs completed 302 evaluations (more than three times the year before), with a lot of that work concentrated on the I-80 corridor. Meth and cocaine led the drug-impaired categories. Marijuana was close behind. Narcotic analgesics, including fentanyl and other opioids, were in the mix as well.
In Teton County, the same drugs are present, but the volume is lower. Drugs move through this valley the same way they move through every other part of Wyoming that sits on a highway and a tourist economy. Having DREs in Teton County is important, as if we cannot recognize drug impairment on the roadside, then we are only enforcing half the DUI cases out there, and hoping that the other half don’t cause catastrophic accidents.
Law enforcement officers are specially selected for DRE training based on their existing attributes and performance in impaired driving enforcement, and proficiency in Standardized Field Sobriety Testing (SFST). If you cannot run SFSTs clean, you do not belong in DRE school.
Then the program itself runs in three phases.
Phase one is DRE Pre-School – about 16 hours of online training, covering an overview of the evaluation, the seven drug categories, eye exams, and another SFST proficiency check. You can wash out here.
Phase two is DRE School – about 56 hours of classroom training, typically a full week after the pre-school. Physiology. Vital signs. Drug combinations. Case preparation. Courtroom testimony. How to write a curriculum vitae that will hold up when a defense attorney comes after your training. Written exams along the way. You have to pass – there is no curve for “close enough.”
Wyoming has run that classroom work in-state. Casper has hosted it. More recently Laramie County has taken over administration of the state’s advanced impaired-driving training through a WYDOT grant. The academics are demanding on purpose. You are being trained to take blood pressure, read pupil size in three lighting conditions, and distinguish a stimulant presentation from a narcotic presentation – and to recognize when the person in front of you is having a stroke, not a high.
Phase three is field certification. This is the part most people do not understand.
Classroom volunteers and wet labs can only take you so far. To get certified you have to complete a minimum of 12 drug-influence evaluations under a DRE instructor. You have to encounter and correctly identify at least three of the seven drug categories. Toxicology has to corroborate your opinions at least 75 percent of the time. Then you sit a final knowledge exam and two instructors have to sign off.
Wyoming does not generate enough drug-impaired subjects, on a predictable schedule, for a class of candidates to finish those 12 evaluations at home. That is why the field work happens in cities with volume. I did that piece in Sacramento.
You are not evaluating actors. You are evaluating drug-impaired people contacted on the street, under the supervision of instructors who have run this protocol hundreds of times. You take pulse three times during the evaluation because stimulant pulse and narcotic pulse do not behave the same way over 40 minutes. You check muscle tone because a dissociative anesthetic presents differently than a depressant. You look for injection sites. You measure pupils in near-total darkness. Then you form an opinion, and a lab later tells you whether you earned it.
That is the standard. It exists because a DRE opinion goes into a report and, often, onto a witness stand. If the training is sloppy, the case is sloppy, and an impaired driver walks.
Certification is not permanent. Every two years you have to complete at least four evaluations, get instructor review on at least one of them, and sit eight hours of recertification training. If you do not keep the skill current, you lose it.
The protocol is borrowed from clinical examination, not invented on a traffic stop. In order:
The sequence is the point. You do not skip to the conclusion because the person “looks high.” You collect the same data set every time so the opinion can be compared against the lab and against other DREs.
A good DRE evaluation also protects the innocent and the sick. I have seen enough medical calls in this job to know that a stroke, a diabetic emergency, a head injury, and a stimulant binge can look similar to an untrained eye. The preliminary exam exists to pull those people toward a hospital, not a holding cell.
Kratom is a good example of why step 12 is not automatic.
It is not new as a plant. It is new as a regular problem in American impaired-driving work. Ten or fifteen years ago most deputies, prosecutors, and crime labs were not talking about it. Now it is sold in gas stations and online as a “natural” product. Drivers treat it like a supplement. Some use it for pain or to get off opioids. The law still cares about one thing: can this person drive?
Often they cannot. The hard part is proving why.
There is no roadside device for it. There is no 0.08 number. And kratom is not on the standard blood panel used in most DWUI cases. That panel is built around the drugs labs have been seeing for years – alcohol is handled on the breath test; blood work is aimed at things like meth, cocaine, opioids, benzodiazepines, and cannabis. Mitragynine and 7-hydroxymitragynine, the alkaloids in kratom, are not on that default list.
The blood can come back “negative” while the driver is still impaired, because the state lab didn’t test for it. Confirming it takes a specific request and a specific lab to test for it.
Teton County needs leadership that understands the difference between a drug recognition protocol and a slogan. DRE is a protocol, but it does not replace investigation, toxicology, or prosecutorial judgment. It does not make an officer a doctor, but it does give a deputy a systematic way to document impairment when alcohol is not the answer – and a way to say, under oath, how they reached that conclusion.
Wyoming’s program almost went away in 2023 when the Highway Patrol was prepared to drop coordination. Laramie County Sheriff Brian Kozak took it over. That is the only reason the state still has a bench of 47. Programs like this survive when someone decides they are worth the overtime, the travel, and the grant paperwork. They die when an office treats advanced training as optional decoration.
I went through the training because the roadside is where the gap shows up. A family coming home from Jackson does not care whether the other driver was drunk or on drugs. They care whether their family member makes it home safely. A Drug Recognition Expert exists to ensure that they do.
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