Simulated Driving Performance in Abstinent Heroin Misusers: A Comparative Control Study

Driving after drug use like heroin increases the risk of traffic crashes and such drug driving accidents have appeared more frequently over the past ten years. The current study compared the driving performance of drivers with heroin addiction and healthy controls. The participants were required to attend the Lane Change Task (LCT) and the adapted Change/No Change task to measure driving performance. In addition, the Attention Bias Task was used to quantify the drug addiction severity. Results showed that heroin misusers performed poorer driving performance than the healthy controls in the LCT task and in the Change/ No Change task. The correlation between attention bias to drug and driving performance indicated that addiction severity was associated with poorer driving performance. The results of this study suggest that the mechanisms of how drug use changes attention bias, which thereby further impairs driving performance. This study can inform how to persuade drivers of drug use and provide suggestions on how to give up drugs and thus improve driving safety.