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With Pot Legal, Scientists Study Detection of Impaired Drivers
Hugh Pickens writes "A recent assessment by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, based on random roadside checks, found that 16.3% of all drivers nationwide at night were on various legal and illegal impairing drugs, half them high on marijuana. Now AP reports that with marijuana soon legal under state laws in Washington and Colorado, setting a standard comparable to blood-alcohol limits has sparked intense disagreement. Unlike portable breath tests for alcohol, there's no easily available way to determine whether someone is impaired from recent pot use. If scientists can't tell someone how much marijuana it will take for him or her to test over the threshold, how is the average pot user supposed to know? 'We've had decades of studies and experience with alcohol,' says Washington State Patrol spokesman Dan Coon. 'Marijuana is new, so it's going to take some time to figure out how the courts and prosecutors are going to handle it.' Driving within three hours of smoking pot is associated with a near doubling of the risk of fatal crashes. However, THC can remain in blood and saliva for highly variable times after the last use of the drug. Although the marijuana 'high' only lasts three to five hours, studies of heavy users in a locked hospital ward showed THC can be detected in the blood up to a week after they are abstinent, and the outer limit of detection time in saliva tests is not known. 'A lot of effort has gone into the study of drugged driving and marijuana, because that is the most prevalent drug, but we are not nearly to the point where we are with alcohol,' says Jeffrey P. Michael, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's impaired-driving director. 'We don't know what level of marijuana impairs a driver.'"
Who cares? If you for whatever reason aren't capable of driving a vehicle, then you shouldn't be allowed to, no matter the reason. Design the test in such a way that it tests for skills needed to drive a vehicle, kind of like a field driver's exam. Then stop worrying about how much pot is too much and start concentrating on what skills are actually needed to drive. Problem solved.
... whatever
All three of these responses are spot-on. Remember, driving is a privilege, not a right.
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A mere 80 or so years too late, of course. But better late than never.
Now if any state had the testicular fortitude to challenge them over their utterly unconstitutional use of the threat of withholding federal highway funds from states that failed to raise the drinking age to 21, we might see a restoration of sanity in that direction as well. Otherwise we might as well just ditch the constitution and abolish state and local government and get it all over with.
But getting the US government out of the marijuana game as the first step to getting it largely out of the drug game altogether might be good first steps to dismantling the current police state, and in the process saving perhaps 100 billion dollars (in all costs) nationwide. Maybe more -- drugs are roughly a half-trillion dollar business globally, and laundering drug money is a major mainstay of our banking system and creates a veritable shadow government with a steady stream of untaxed, illegal income that produces compounded wealth and disproportionate power for those that are involved.
It also opens up the states that legalize it to entirely new (taxable, now legitimate) industries -- not just recreational pot but an entire spectrum of hemp-derived products that are difficult to impossible to produce at this time. The hemp plant was enormously useful before it was made illegal, and to some extent was made illegal because it was so useful. I wish NC would follow in CO and WA's footsteps, because hemp would make an ideal cash crop to replace tobacco (the real "killer drug" of the US).
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Decriminalization removes criminal penalties, like jail and record keeping of you being convicted of having drugs. It can still be illegal, but just a minor fine or penalty. Legalization removes all legal penalties.
Perhaps more importantly, legalization provides a framework for the legal *sale* of weed, in the same way booze has a legal framework for its sale. You don't get that with decriminalization.
> Now if any state had the testicular fortitude to challenge them over their utterly unconstitutional use of the threat
> of withholding federal highway funds from states that failed to raise the drinking age to 21,
As another poster pointed out: it already happened and they lost.
The problem is simple: The federal government has the power to levy an income tax all citizens without any real accountability. Thus, they can just 'steal' tax money from a state by raising taxes and keeping the increased revenue (unless you behave). Sure, the state _could_ levy its own transportation taxes and eschew the federal money, but now its people are getting double taxed and not seeing the benefits of half of it. As a result people leave, protest, etc. The only real ability to allow states the ability to control the drinking age it to change the federal law, unfortunately. (Or maybe an amendment prohibiting redistribution of money to the states?)
Anyways, another challenge would almost certainly go down in flames: SCOTUS already hinted (IIRC) that they're okay with the 'Obamacare' no-health-insurance penalty if it's constructed as a tax, so they're probably okay with the general idea of the federal government coercing behavior with taxation. I'm looking forward to our free speech tax.
Pot is still ILLEGAL everywhere that the United States federal government has jurisdiction. Don't make a stupid mistake, and get busted because you THINK that pot is legal.
What the new state laws amount to, is the states have told the feds, "We're not going to enforce your stupid laws for you, and we're turning a blind eye unless someone is really being stupid."
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
And this is why we should be signing secession petitions. Not because one of the twin candidates lost, but because the Federal government long ago began overreaching.
marijuana use in the absence of other substances impairs driving very little
Yeah, my stoner roommate used to say shit like that too. Of course, he also claimed it helped him study, but unless one considers watching the Cartoon Network all day "studying" then I never saw any evidence of it. And, while I never was a full-time stoner myself, I did smoke enough to know that I sure as shit wouldn't have felt comfortable driving on it (or doing anything else that required concentration).
Of course, I'm sure the stoner brigade can produce a plethora of studies claiming that weed is a fucking miracle cure-all with no downsides whatsoever, written by the same kind of biased researchers that produce studies showing that burning shit-tons of coal is great for the environment.
So your "gut feeling" is more relevant than peer-reviewed studies because you "feel" that the researchers are biased? Please refute the data with data, not emotional reactions to the "stoner brigade". For example, here is a study on driving under the influence of Cannabis that cites several other studies, if you have a problem with the data please point out the problem instead of resorting to logical fallacies.
http://epirev.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/2/222.full.pdf
Enigma
You know nothing about stoners.
They don't sit there for a long time because their sense of time is distorted. They sit there because they aren't paying attention to the light itself and are paying attention to other things in the environment around them.
In reality, the red light turning green is almost but not quiet the LEAST important thing about driving. If you argued running red lights you might have something, except that doesn't happen either.
Doctors stoned on pot don't scare me even a little bit, you'll know from his/her actions if they are incapable of doing their job. I'm far more afraid of someone being fucked up on an opiate like Vicodine than pot. If you knew anything about the two you would be too. The opiate may not show its symptoms and still cause serious mental effects. Pot on the other hand makes it obvious, and when it doesn't ... it doesn't, and its not that big of a deal.
You don't need a drug test to tell if a pothead is incompetent. If you pull him over because of his bad driving, thats enough. Same applies to alcohol for that matter. The tests are just there to cover cops asses. The requirements for a test are there to prevent cops from abusing the illegal nature of it. In both cases, determining if someone shouldn't be doing something because they are impaired is done WITHOUT a test. The test is just to prevent bad people (overzealous cops and lawyers representing guilty) from abusing otherwise perfectly legitimate methods of accomplishing a task.
I agree that impairment is not acceptable in many situations, but you have absolutely no idea what causes that impairment, you're just parroting someone elses statements.
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