Western Australian drivers can now be tested for cocaine at the roadside — and 97 tests have already come back positive for it.

Police Minister Reece Whitby told the Legislative Assembly on 15 September that more than 8,000 roadside drug tests had been conducted since cocaine testing began, returning more than 1,000 positive results overall. Ninety-seven of those were positive for cocaine.

"Taking cocaine, Mr Speaker, is a bad idea — I am not directing that to you in particular! — but taking cocaine and getting behind the wheel is worse," Mr Whitby told the house. "If someone has cocaine in their system, they have no business being behind the wheel."

Cocaine is the fourth drug WA police can screen for at the roadside. Officers could already test for tetrahydrocannabinol — the active compound in cannabis — along with methylamphetamine and MDMA.

The minister's own figures carry a detail he did not draw out. More than 1,000 positives from more than 8,000 tests is roughly one test in eight coming back positive for something. Cocaine accounts for fewer than one positive in ten, and about one test in a hundred overall.

It started in July. The announcement came in September.

The change became law on 9 July 2026, through a set of regulations published on the WA legislation website on 8 July. No government media statement accompanied them.

The instrument is the Road Traffic (Drug Driving) Amendment Regulations 2026, made by the Governor in Executive Council. It runs to fourteen regulations, most of which rewrite the roadside testing procedure. The change that matters here is a single word. Regulation 3 of the Road Traffic (Drug Driving) Regulations 2007 lists the drugs declared to be a "prescribed illicit drug" — the list a driver can be charged for simply having in their system. It ran to three paragraphs, ending at MDMA. The amendment added a fourth: "(d) cocaine."

The government's public announcement did not follow until 10 September — two months and a day after the law took effect. That media statement, issued in the names of Mr Whitby and Road Safety Minister Jessica Stojkovski, is written as though the change were happening then: drivers with cocaine in their system "will now be detected", and the new testing "is being rolled out". It makes no mention of the regulations, and gives no commencement date.

None of this was hidden. The regulations went up on the legislation website in the ordinary way, and the device approvals were gazetted the day before. But the law changed in July and the government did not announce it until September — and by the time the minister put a number to it, in Parliament on 15 September, the testing had been running for more than two months.

By the time the announcement was issued, the Road Safety Commission's drink and drug driving page had already been updated to list cocaine. That page records its last update as 4 September — six days before.

Ms Stojkovski, announcing the change in September, said: "We know driving impaired is one of the leading causes of road trauma in Western Australia so it's incredibly important we have new and innovative ways to stop drug driving."

What the law says

Driving with a prescribed illicit drug in oral fluid or blood is an offence under section 64AC of the Road Traffic Act 1974. The Act sets the penalty in penalty units; a separate Act fixes each unit at $50.

• First offence: a fine of up to 25 penalty units — $1,250. The Road Safety Commission also lists 3 demerit points.
• Second or subsequent offence: a fine of between 25 and 40 penalty units — $1,250 to $2,000 — and the court must disqualify the driver from holding a licence for at least six months.

There is a catch in how a "second offence" is counted. Under section 64AC(3), an offence previously committed against sections 64AB, 64B, 64C, 67AB or 67AD is deemed to have been an offence against section 64AC when a court decides whether the matter before it is a first, second or subsequent offence. Section 64AB is the separate offence of driving while impaired by drugs; section 64B covers driving at 0.05 or above while also carrying a prescribed illicit drug. A driver with one of those on their record can find a first cocaine positive treated as a second offence, with the mandatory disqualification that carries.

A positive roadside test has an immediate consequence as well. WA Police issue drivers who test positive — or who refuse a roadside drug test — with a prohibition notice banning them from driving for 24 hours. Breaching it can draw a $600 infringement.

This is the lesser of WA's two main drug driving offences. It turns on the mere presence of the drug, not on impairment. For the separate offence of driving while impaired by drugs, the Road Safety Commission lists penalties starting at $1,700 and a minimum 10-month disqualification, rising to disqualification for life on a third offence.

The device the announcement didn't name

Neither the media statement nor the minister's remarks to Parliament identified the new equipment. Mr Whitby called it a "new multi-drug testing device"; the media statement said only that police "will now use new multi-drug testing devices". The regulations name it.

The approved kit is the Securetec DrugWipe 3 S Combo — printed in the regulations and the gazette in capitals, as SECURETEC DRUGWIPE 3 S COMBO. It sits alongside the Securetec DrugWipe II Twin Combo that WA has used for years, and the regulations still set out a testing procedure covering both. It is approved for the confirmatory test under section 66D of the Act, and that approval replaced the previous one outright. A second notice approves a device the gazette calls the SECURETEC DRUGSWIPE 3 S for the preliminary roadside screen under section 66C.

Both were approved by Mr Whitby personally, by notice in Government Gazette No. 80 of 7 July 2026 — the day before the regulations were published. The notices are brief and slightly rough: one is headed "Device approve" rather than "approved", its final sentence has no full stop, and it spells the device "DRUGSWIPE" where the other notice and the regulations spell it "DRUGWIPE".

One line in the first of those notices is quietly striking. To approve the new device, the minister had to revoke the previous approval — the Road Traffic (Approved Device) Notice 2014, gazetted on 11 July 2014. WA's drug-testing device approval had stood unchanged for almost exactly twelve years.

What the test involves

Two tests sit behind those numbers. The roadside screen comes first, under section 66C; a driver who returns a positive then gives a second sample for the confirmatory test under section 66D. It is that second procedure the regulations set out step by step, and the July amendment rewrote nearly all of it — replacing or amending every clause, and collapsing its second division into the first, four clauses replaced by one.

A driver is directed to move their tongue around inside their mouth three times, then to wipe both sides of a collection pad down their tongue, place the pad under their tongue and close their mouth. They are told not to bite or chew it. The pad stays there until an indicator on the device turns blue, or until 15 minutes have passed — whichever comes first.

The officer then dabs the testing kit's wipe on the collection pad and checks that the sampling pads change colour from pink to yellow — a new verification step the amendment added. The device is held upright, an ampoule inside it is broken by squeezing the word PRESS, and it is held upright for another ten to fifteen seconds before being laid flat and left undisturbed for two minutes. Then the result is read.

From the same sample, a portion goes to the laboratory. The regulations require it to be split between two sealed tubes, each barcoded and sealed into its own biohazard evidence bag.

The paperwork changed too. Form 5, the authorised drug tester's certificate, now carries four "yes/no" lines instead of three, with cocaine added at the bottom. The amendment also went through the form replacing the word "analysis" with "test" — a change to what the certificate attests.

The fee that also went up

The same amendment did something else, which the government has not explained.

The fee for analysing an oral fluid sample at the Chemistry Centre (WA) rose from $185 to $230 — an increase of $45, or 24 per cent, and the first change since December 2018. Before December 2018 the fee had been tiered by how many drugs were screened: $200 for one, $315 for more than one. It is now a single flat fee, even with a fourth drug on the list.

That fee is not paid at the roadside. The Commissioner of Police pays it. But if the driver is convicted, the court must order them to repay it, and it can be recovered as if it were a penalty under the Act. A first offender therefore faces up to $1,250 plus $230 in laboratory costs.

Where WA sits

The government says the change "brings Western Australia into line with most other Australian jurisdictions". That is true, but only just — and it understates how late WA is.

New South Wales has screened for cocaine at the roadside since 2018. Queensland added it on 7 July 2023, announcing it two days later. The ACT added both cocaine and the new device on 1 January 2025. South Australia followed on 5 November 2025. WA, in July 2026, is the last of them to start.

Two jurisdictions do not. Victoria is the outright exception: the word "cocaine" does not appear anywhere in its Road Safety Act 1986, and its list of prescribed illicit drugs runs to just three substances — methylamphetamine, MDMA and THC. In Australia's second most populous state, cocaine-affected driving is reachable only through the separate impairment offence and a blood test. In the Northern Territory, the government says its initial random roadside screen covers THC, methylamphetamine and MDMA only, with cocaine picked up on a second roadside test that is administered only after a positive first result.

Tasmania prescribes cocaine as an illicit drug in its road law — one of eighteen listed — but what its roadside screening device actually detects is set by a gazette notice that is not readily available, so its position cannot be stated with confidence.

There is a common thread. Queensland, the ACT, South Australia and now WA all made the change by approving the same device — the Securetec DrugWipe 3 S, in one form or another. The spread of cocaine testing across Australia has largely been one product's adoption curve.

What we still don't know

A good deal about the rollout remains unpublished.

The government has not said what the new devices cost, how many were bought, or how they are distributed between metropolitan and regional units. Mr Whitby told Parliament the technology "will be used across metropolitan and regional Western Australia", without detail.

The WA Police Force has not announced the rollout itself. A search of its announcements on wa.gov.au across July, August and September turns up no media release and no officer quoted on it; the only government voices on the record are the two ministers. The force's road policing releases through August continued to report drug detections only as motorists "with illicit substances in their system", without naming the drug.

Apart from the one sentence in Parliament, no official source breaks roadside drug-testing results down by substance. The figure of 97 cocaine positives exists publicly nowhere else — and the daily Hansard record it appears in is an uncorrected proof.

Nor is it clear how many of those 8,000-plus roadside tests were run on a cocaine-capable device. The minister's July notice approving the new preliminary screening device revoked nothing, so whatever was approved for roadside use before it stands untouched on the record — and no published source says whether every roadside unit now carries the new kit, or when the changeover finished.

Photo: the Mitchell Freeway, Perth, at dusk. Orderinchaos / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0. The image is illustrative and does not depict a drug-testing operation.