Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Just ask the driver what snack they'd like from the police car.
You just do the same thing that cops do when the driver refuses the breath test... a Field Sobriety Test.
I know this is going to be a really odd way to detect impared drivers as far as people think but it is quite imperical and correct. You simply have the person do a coordination test with a video game type device. Impared drivers will show up whatever the reason. This can also be determined by blink rate and by detection of eye movements. It can be done very rapidly and has been in use by some municipal bus systems for some time with quite spectacular reductions in accidents. In fact this could be built into cars and we could have the car simply park if the driver is impared. (WOW! No arrest needed!) How about this wild idea. Skipping the police and stopping filling our jails and stopping all the fines etc while achieving the goal of public safety. It detects all types of imparement and doesn't bother wasting time on any other issue. Sleepy is detected too.
This is going to get to be a moot point shortly as the cars will have things like advanced adaptive cruise control that essentially drives the car. How about Google's self driving car etc. I think we are going to ban driving of cars by humans very shortly as they simply are the most dangerous part of the car driving system. You know the NUT behind the wheel is the most dangerous part of the car.
Here is my personal anecdote.
I've been driving high nearly every day for almost 20 years, commuting at least 100 miles a day for 17 of those. I have never been in an accident & my last ticket (41 in a 30) was over 8 years ago.
I don't drink & drive at all, that shit is dangerous.
The blood alcohol level is a red herring. It correlates with impairment, but a number of other factors also affect it. The test should be for reactions and situational awareness. If you fail for any reason, then you should be prevented from driving. If you fail and also have been taking drugs that are known to cause this kind of impairment, then you might get some extra penalty.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
According to NORML, what basically happens when someone is driving while on marijuana is that while they're somewhat impaired, they also drive more cautiously and leave more space around them. The net effect is that while they're annoying, they aren't all that dangerous.
By contrast, when someone is driving drunk, they tend to be both impaired and reckless. The net effect is that thousands of people each year are killed by drunk drivers.
I am officially gone from
The first-ever “National Roadside Survey of Alcohol and Drug Use by Drivers”, conducted by NHTSA, found that 16.3 percent of nighttime drivers were drug-positive, with marijuana (THC) at (8.6 percent) being the most commonly detected drug.
and
In fall 2010, six cities in California (Anaheim, Bakersfield, Eureka, Fresno, San Rafael, and Torrance) conducted nighttime weekend “voluntary” roadside surveys primarily to gather data on marijuana use among nighttime drivers. The results were that 8.4 percent of the drivers providing oral fluid were positive for marijuana and 7.6 percent of the breath tested drivers tested positive for some amount of alcohol.
These are two different surveys, but the second one shows a slightly different picture than "half them high on marijuana". 8.4% in this study showed some presence of marijuana in their saliva. From the summary, I gather that all that really means is that 8.4% had smoked pot some time in the last couple weeks. 7.6% had had some amount of alcohol still detectable in their breath, although that includes people with a trace amount, well under the legal limit. So, I'm not going to adjust my general expectations of other drivers to think that one in every 6 drivers at night is drunk and/or high.
www.clarke.ca
This. Right now if someone hits and kills a pedestrian, it's called an "accident" and they go free if they're sober - but they go to jail for many years if they had a drink. It doesn't matter that incompetent driving caused the death - the only time a driver is punished appropriately is when they had a drink.
A test for competency would also get a lot of older drivers who cannot drive safely any more off the road.
In some places (parts of Australia for example) the law simply says you aren't allowed to drive and have any trace of THC in your hair/saliva/blood. This works because the drug is already outlawed. However, it's not fair to say that the drug is legal, but you aren't allowed to use it within a week (or whatever) of driving.
However, as with alcohol, the problem isn't the numbers, it's the impairment. With alcohol now, the law doesn't even care about impairment. If your blood alcohol level (as measured by a machine testing the amount of alcohol in your breath[1]) is higher than X, that's illegal.
The solution is to obviously remove the numbers from the equation, and come up with a objective test for impairment. Walk along the line one foot placed just in front of the other, for example[2]. This would also apply to people who haven't got enough sleep recently.
Another option would be to simply outlaw driving dangerously or in a fashion that could cause harm to others. Then, for all the drunks and stoners, and people who just haven't slept properly in the last three days, if they can drive safely without swerving, or crashing, they can get home fine. But, if they swerve, then pull 'em over and book 'em. Perhaps.
A difficult situation. I just hope the solution doesn't reduce people's freedoms any more.
Footnotes:
1. Want to get busted without drinking more than a tiny amount of booze? Just before you breath into the machine, swill some whiskey around in your mouth. Just a tablespoon should be enough.
2. This isn't objective, because many people can't actually do this because their balance is poor, but they can still drive a care perfectly well.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
Oh dear, that's almost as dangerous as dialing a phone.
Given how the police have broad surveillance powers to correlate cell phone logs against the mandatory GPS units installed in our cars in order to determine if we were dialing while driving, it is not unreasonable that we demand they have similar powers over knowing when pot smokers inhale their illicitly legal drug.
"Looks like a black guy is driving. Let's test him for THC and arrest him if he tests above 0."
Palm trees and 8
So number 1... which is all I really need, is how did they determine half the people pulled over were smoking cannabis? They say in the article they can't.
2 - the numbers are probably skewed in the way of cannabis because the US cannot lose any wars. And the war on drugs, is a war. So this is just a continuation of the scare tactics we've seen all too much.
3 - I know pharmacists. They say at least 50% of the population is on lortabs, percocets, etc... Stuff with hydrocodon and oxycodone. It could be easy to say, that chances are if you're reading this, you have a prescription.
Bottom line, the study is flawed and just a continuation of scare tactics IMVHO.
What makes you think the period of the "high" is the entirety of the drug's effects? I bet we'll find that the period of noticeable impairment is somewhat longer than the period of the high. Not a whole lot longer though. But would it surprise you if it turns out that one needs to hold off from driving for a couple hours after the high passes?
What "threshold"? If pot really has such an impairment effect, then why not just use the standard sobriety test.
There is no impartial field (standard) sobriety test. It is up to the officer administering the test to both administer the test and interpret the results. It is very easy to skew or mangle this, on purpose or otherwise. When you have something that independently produces a number, you have an impartial result.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
But, in the summary, it said it could be detected a week after imbibing. So guy smokes pot and then, five days later, is pulled over by a cop. The cop suspects him of being under the influence (was driving erratically for some reason or perhaps the cop is just stereotyping based on what the guy looks like) so administers the test. This shows a small amount of THC in his system and he's arrested of driving under the influence (zero tolerance). However, he hasn't smoked any pot at all in a few days and is definitely not under the influence.
That's why it's important to figure out how to sort through the "smoked a bunch of weed and is now driving impaired" folks and the "smoked some weed hours/days ago, is fine now, but has detectable remnants of THC in his system."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Driving within three hours of smoking pot is associated with a near doubling of the risk of fatal crashes.
with:
'We don't know what level of marijuana impairs a driver.'"
One of those two statements HAS to be a lie.
Personally, I have NEVER heard of a story where Marijuana "impairment" alone has been implicated as the causal factor in any traffic fatality.
And that "one week" figure is also completely bogus. Even a drugstore urine test can detect Marijuana use for around 30 days.
There have been no reputable studies that show that driving while high on pot is significantly more dangerous than driving while "sober". Any study of accidents where Marijuana use was also detected would be hard-pressed to find that the pot "impairment" was the cause. But watch the fake statistics start to pile in, by "scientists" looking for their next "Grant-Welfare" money, as the NIH helps the Federal Government "make the case against pot".
Mark my words.
If you're in Europe, you can tune this out. Even in most American cities public transit is abysmal. In Boston for example, the subways shut down at midnight. For reference, the bars close at 1AM. That's in a major city. Most Americans don't live in the cities. And most suburban and rural areas don't even have taxi services available. In most of the US, rhetoric aside, driving isn't a privilege: Driving is a necessity.
Oddly, American towns and cities did had good public transit a hundred years ago. Back then, even most small towns had trolley services. Then a conspiracy destroyed public transit. It's OK though; after making millions destroying public infrastructure and lobbying against light rail, GM had to pay a $5000 fine. For more details, watch "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" It covers the basic story pretty well. The real life bad guys were a shade more cartoonish than Christopher Lloyd though.
And then there is the question of enforcement. Would the testing be done in the same, "at the whim of the guy with the badge" approach we have now? We don't inspect or enforce pretty much any public health issues in the US. Food safety, Drug safety, traffic safety, etc.: All public safety in the US is set up to assign blame after stuff hits the fan. It didn't used to be like this either.
How do you objectively test for "situational awareness"? I don't know of ANY way to do it, that isn't completely at the whim of the person conducting the test. Most cops should not be taken at their word. Right now, there are huge scandals in Massachusetts over these exact two things. One over a police lab making up evidence, falsifying data and generally doing bad things; for more than a decade. And second a failure to oversee a compounding center, and just generally assigning blame later after many people contracted fungal meningitis from contaminated shots. And the only reason it was exposed was that one doctor took on themselves to track down the cause of an odd outbreak.
The test should be for reactions and situational awareness. If you fail for any reason, then you should be prevented from driving. If you fail and also have been taking drugs that are known to cause this kind of impairment, then you might get some extra penalty.
It's a common brush-off answer. But it ignores reality completely. If you can't balance on one leg and touch your nose, while reciting the alphabet backwards... you fail. If you refuse to walk a straight line backwards in icy, sub-zero conditions... you fail. It doesn't matter that you have artificial hips, knees, or limbs.
Very good point. I too am in favor of decriminalization but not legalization. Most people that don't smoke pot today that actually want to smoke it don't because of employment concerns. It's difficult nowadays to find a job that pays a decent wage that doesn't drug test. I know many people that I work with that talk about pot and how they'd like to smoke it but can't take a chance on losing their job. Note they didn't even mention the law.
They already have a test... its the Field sobriety test, and it's a hell of a lot more accurate than a blood test. If you gave my mom 1 beer, and put her on the road, I'd be terrified. If you gave my uncle a 6 pack, he could likely drive just fine. But he'd fail the blood test while my mother would not. The field sobriety test on the other hand would show who really shouldn't be driving. Irrelevant of the drugs you're taking, your reaction time, focus, and balance are the only true way to measure if you should be driving or not. Because that's what matters right? If you can DRIVE? Or are we trying to do something else here?
LOL he should chill out and smoke some pot.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Regardless of the circumstances, we have a personal responsibility to not put others in danger with our actions. Vehicles are multi-thousand pound missiles, heavy machinery easily capable of severely injuring and killing other people; if you're too tired to operate one safely, there's really no excuse for doing so.
Driving is entirely a convenience, and certainly not a right or a requirement. A responsible adult can (and should) plan around the reality of not being able to drive; 'working 20 hours' isn't an excuse, it's a situation that you're dealt with and need to handle, and driving while being tired enough to be impaired is a personal choice.
LegendMUD
I have a friend who has two jobs, goes to school for his bachelors degree, has a wife and a new-born son. When I asked him how he copes he replied: "Copious amount of marijuana, bro." He smokes when he wakes up, smokes on his drive in to work, smokes during lunch, smokes on his way to night classes or his second job and a few hits at night before bed.
Similarly, I have known several people who were functioning alcoholics. What exactly does this prove?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
In most of the U.S., you can pretty much fire someone for just about anything (short of gender, race, or religion).
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
There are tons of other legal prescription medication that people take that will fuck them up more then pot when it comes to being able to drive a car. Are we stopping people for that?
We should be.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Colorado State Police have announced that they plan to start aggressively enforcing minimum speed limits...
Impaired drivers are easy enough to spot.
A drunk driver will run a stop sign
The stoned driver waits for it to turn green.
Drug posession and use were decriminalized in Mexico (where I live) in 2009. *All* drugs. However, growing and selling them is not legal, and is criminal. What does this mean?
If I am found carrying or smoking a pot cigarrette (or injecting a heroine dose, or whatever), I am not a criminal — I might be a candidate for psychiatric help at some institutions, yes (most probably if I'm a reincident), but not going to jail.
If I have 60 pot plants at home, i am not only doing something illegal, but a criminal offense.
If I have over the allowed dose for personal use, I am (probably?) trying to sell it, and it is a crime.
Not that our situation is ideal. Far from it. I believe full legalization is the only way out. But at least, it shifts the penalization to the real wrongdoers in our current situation.