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Breath Test For Pot Being Developed At WSU
An anonymous reader writes with this news from Tacoma, WA's News Tribune: A team at Washington State University is working to develop a breath test that could quickly determine whether a driver is under the influence of marijuana. Law enforcement officers already use preliminary breath tests in the field to estimate drivers' blood alcohol content. But no similar portable tool exists to test for marijuana impairment ... Stoned drivers have become an increasing concern since Washington voters legalized recreational use of marijuana ... A quarter of blood samples taken from drivers in 2013, the first full year the initiative was in effect, came back positive for pot. ... officers and prosecutors rely on blood tests to determine how much active THC is present in a driver's blood. Those test results aren't immediately available to patrol officers who suspect someone is driving high." Also reported: "Under Washington's legal marijuana law, those who get caught driving with a blood content of at least 5 nanograms of active THC per milliliter are subject to an automatic driver's license suspension of 90 days or more."
As great as any new technology is, I hope this is antiquated by law changes before the technical application machines become practical.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
It's easy to see where this is going.
Marijuana users = Revenue stream: taxes and Driving While Impaired/Intoxicated tickets
It will probably help improve public safety.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
After it became legal in CO I've been playing around with it a bit and I think there is a huge difference between driving high and having used small amounts. I think if someone takes a few hits to relax about traffic they are going to be safer than a "sober" but frustrated person who tailgates and jackrabbits around. I don't think this is as cut and dry as alcohol.
Where are the properly controlled studies showing that a given level of blood THC is causally related to an increase in driving accidents?
Or will they go the route of cell phones and accidents and only look at the THC blood levels of drivers in accidents so it's impossible to show causation?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
So the cops blood tested all of these people with what I assume is probably cause and only 25% were actually under the influence? Or do they just randomly blood test everyone and 25% of all Washington drivers are high?
I think we're parked, man!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Slower yes, but still a danger to themselves and others. Here in Oz the booze busses make you blow in the bag for booze, and lick the lollypop for drugs. Here in Victoria, the random booze busses have cut the total number of deaths on the road by over 50% in the last 25yrs (from over 700/yr down to under 300/yr), this is despite there being twice as many cars on the road. The highest death toll was in 1969 when there were something like 1/10th the number of cars on the road as there are today, no seatbelts, no breathalysers, no speed/red light cameras, ~1200 people killed a year.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
My stance on pot has angered many from both the pro-pot and anti-pot camps. I have been waiting for a test along these lines - preferably easily-administered and quantifiable - to determine when someone has taken in too much pot to be in public. Then we can really treat pot the same way we treat alcohol - with fines for those who have taken in too much to be in public - and I would be fine with open sales. As I've said before, I don't even give half a shit how stoned you are if you stay home (or have a designated driver [taxis are fine]) but if you decide to go out driving while stoned you can spend the night in jail and get a DUI along with the drunks.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
That is a marvelous achievement.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Even the National Highway Traffic Administration says measured active THC levels can't be correlated with impairment:
"It is difficult to establish a relationship between a person's THC blood or plasma concentration and performance impairing effects ... It is inadvisable to try and predict effects based on blood THC concentrations alone." - http://www.businessinsider.com...
Also, given the difference in absorption rates between edibles and smoking, it's possible for someone who ate it to be more impaired but give a lower reading than someone who smoked it. - http://www.theverge.com/2012/1...
I can smell a pot smoker from a mile away. Put people before technology for once, and give me the job!
Maybe driverless cars will solve the problem.
Drunken drivers already cost us a fortune in enforcement, jailing etc.. Now we have another very expensive issue with pot and driving while high. Worse yet the strength of each dose of pot will vary wildly so the user can be much higher than he intended to be or less high than he intended to be. And being that people who have just smoked pot are not able to tell at all how high they are they will tend to drive when many times they should not. Since we already lock up more citizens than any nation on the planet can the tax payer really afford this problem? And just to make it even a darker issue our jails and prisons usually make a person worse than when they offended and the worse the jail or prison the more likely inmates are to turn to a life of crime. We need teams of ministers to be in the jails and being there at all hours to stop what amounts to torture of inmates. Such policies as making it very, very difficult to get any reading material at all, charging huge fees for phone calls which breaks up families, failure to deliver quick medical care in emergencies and deliberate abuse by prison staff need to be halted dead in their tracks. The idea is to release a better inmate and not fill inmates with rage that will effect their behavior when released.
Why not use a swab as an initial indicator like in other parts of the world.
I don't understand why this necessitates new technology, especially when it would seem more important to study level of impairment with drug concentration before going any further down the legislative road.
If you can profit from door to door sales of the Obvious-o-Tron 3000, would you complain?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
They use a saliva test here in Australia.
Frequent smokers are unlikely to get bloodshot eyes unless they smoke more than their normal daily peak dose. Not everybody munches. Not everybody driving stoned will have smoked it in the car, just like not every drunk driver drank in the car. The effects last 5-8 hours, after all.
I worked with a chemist 15 years ago to develop such a product. A professor had found a salt, Fast Blue B, would change color specific to THC.
We were charged with trying to commercialize this, BUT, we couldn't prove that blood ratio had anything to do with breath concentration.
Breathalyzers for Alcohol are calibrated with an inferred ratio of 2100:1, of blood/breath concentration ratio. This is usually a fairly accurate assumption. The alcohol molecule is very volatile. THC on the other hand is a very different beast. If someone has smoked Marijuana, what you are reading is the residue on the lining of the airways which has a very poor correlation to what is in their blood.
This alone was enough to kill the idea, because ingesting vs smoking would give wildly different results.
46137
Slower yes, but still a danger to themselves and others. Here in Oz the booze busses make you blow in the bag for booze, and lick the lollypop for drugs. Here in Victoria, the random booze busses have cut the total number of deaths on the road by over 50% in the last 25yrs (from over 700/yr down to under 300/yr), this is despite there being twice as many cars on the road. The highest death toll was in 1969 when there were something like 1/10th the number of cars on the road as there are today, no seatbelts, no breathalysers, no speed/red light cameras, ~1200 people killed a year.
It should also be noted the population of Australia in 1969 was 12,000,000 compared to todays 23,000,000. So we've quartered the road toll whilst doubling the population.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Your post advocates a (X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting pot. Your idea will not work....pot doesn't harm you. I'm too sleepy to finish the form.
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
A field sobriety test doesn't care what substance you've been imbibing. It tests your current level of impairment. Which is what we should be looking at if the goal is to reduce injuries and fatalities on the roads.
Why waste all kinds of money on tests that may or may not be able to measure actual impairment? And that goes for alcohol too.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
If you're going to have a flat penalty scheme, why bother testing the difference?
Add to this the education campaigns which have been very effective at stigmatising drink drivers AND those that let their mates drink drive. The combination of knowing you run a pretty good chance of getting caught and people around you trying to stop you has been very effective.
It's been impossible to get up to the speed limit since they made pot legal in Colorado! Pick any random road and everyone's driving 10-15 under! Ticket revenues are drying up fast, and people in a hurry are experiencing a lot more RROOOAD RRRAGE! It's either this or Taco Bell needs to start delivering, thus removing any need for those people to be out on the road!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Far more lives could be saved if people just stood at home and didn't go out for anything but work and absolutely necessary trips. Do you know how many people die on the way to or from amusement parks? Or restaurants? Or any other leisure activity? Not to mention the accidents during such activities. And I'm not even talking about highly dangerous stuff like paragliding or freeclimbing. Let's just abandon all of this.
A lot more people would be alive. I just doubt that they'd be living.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd rather want to see the statistics for severe accidents than that of road deaths. You might have noticed that cars got a tad bit more safer since 1969, your chance to survive in a modern car is by some margin higher.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... if you've been eating brownies.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I don't think most street cops find marijuana in and of itself to be a very big threat. Many may have some cultural objection to it, but I think mostly they like it illegal because it provides great leverage for harassing people.
I wonder if the drive to find a DWI-like tool for checking for pot consumption among drivers isn't about safe driving but instead looking to regain some of the edge they had when marijuana was illegal.
I doubt we know enough about marijuana yet to develop any kind of biochemical intoxication standard (outside of physical impairment tests) like we have for alcohol due to the persistence of THC (ie, urine tests positive weeks after use). So any new system developed will probably have some kind of granularity that could flag a person who smoked pot an hour ago to 24 hours ago at best and STILL not have anything more than a crude correlation to their possible impairment.
But, public paranoia, the neo-Temperance League moralism of groups like MADD and LEO authoritarianism will combine to make such a "Potalyzer" an acceptable standard and more or less give back LEOs the ability to harass people.
Frankly, I DO wish there was both a hard-science standard of measurable THC impairment AND a magic device to do it with. It would probably help establish that actual impairment for most people is a small number of hours at all but extreme doses and eliminate the nonsense urinalysis screening and discrimination that goes with it.
It will become clear even to the stoniest hippie that drugs and driving do not mix.
"I've smoked for years and never had an accident."
is pretty much the same as
"I've kept a gun in every drawer in the house for years, and never had an accident."
"I drive drunk every day and have never had an accident".
"I have unprotected sex often and have no STDs."
As a cyclist I agree with the guy above who said "fuck you" to all you bastards that think the risk of an accident is acceptable - you will usually hurt others more than yourself. If you need medication to avoid freaking out on the road, you should not drive at all.
Revoke licenses and prohibit offenders from legally enjoying soft drugs - you abuse it, you should lose it.
I just love how they bring up the "% of folks who tested positive for marijuana" like every other slanted sound bite does when it comes to this supposed epidemic of stoned drivers. What they fail to clarify, as usual, is that the vast majority of those people were also drunk, on pills, and/or on other narcotics at the time, which is why they were being tested and presumably were impaired in the first place. They just happened to smoke a joint at some point during all their other drug use. The amount of folks who have only smoked marijuana at some point and driven dangerously enough to pull over is rather tiny.
Even though I'm a medical cannabis user (migraines), I do believe that people shouln't be driving under the influence -- of anything, and that includes the doctor's and pharmacorp's favourte: opiates.
Here in Saskatchewan, the law is intentionally vague and refers to "Driving Under the Influence" without that being restricted to alcohol. If you're obviously impaired, the police don't have to run a bunch of tests to determine what you're impaired by -- it's your driving that is the deciding factor, and your inability to pass basic roadside sobriety tests.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Stoned drivers have become an increasing concern since Washington voters legalized recreational use of marijuana
Right! Because that was the day people started smoking and driving! Nobody ever did it before legalization!
Oh man where do they find these people? Too damn funny.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
"...relatively small."
Relative to other drugs and alcohol - not relative to sober driving.
I could shoot you with a .22 and the wound would be "relatively small" compared to the wound from a .38. You can die from either though.
Also from the article:
"This program of research has shown that marijuana, when taken alone, produces a moderate degree of driving impairment which is related to the consumed THC dose."
Way to cherry-pick your quotes...
They are both likely to cause accidents.
Get as high as fuck and beyond literally every waking second. And if you can still blaze up at all you're not smoking enough. There should be a 4oz a day minimum requirement. Then double it and double it again. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't think that anyone would be so foolish as to say or suggest that THC does not impair driving skills, although the degree of response to THC is much more varied than with alcohol. I'm sorry you read something in my words which you found to be misleading, but I'm glad that you found the linked article to be informative; my goal was to provide more accurate information about the nature of THC intoxication and not to characterize it myself. It is clearly a complicated subject and I didn't want to either quote-mine or take the time to provide a balanced summary.
If I may be allowed to clarify the sentence to which you object, I would say that the GP's comment (the quoted one) was absurd on its face. As they say, the dose makes the poison. There may be some level of THC intoxication which is equivalent (by some measure) to the effects of a .08 BAC, and research in determining that would presumably be worthwhile. Knee-jerk ignorant anti-cannabis rhetoric (or legislation) does not contribute to a reasoned discussion.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
No one would work the corn fields to give the rest Doritos for the munchies, therefore everyone would die.
Oh hellz naw, being stoned will make you a worse driver. There is question as to whether being high has said effect and, if so, at what point. I, personally, have dashcam evidence that the level of high I prefer does not affect my driving. A bit higher and I'd probably be a horrible driver; I don't drive in that state, so I wouldn't know (I only drive high for the first time out of necessity and was amazed when I reviewed the dashcam footage, as I thought I had driven quite poorly at the time). Any alcohol above and beyond a drink with dinner (or combined with any amount of active THC) and you won't see me behind the wheel.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
All scholars come with the usual array of biases. It's the methodology that is supposed to ensure a reliable result. Look at the methodology.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"... and was amazed when I reviewed the dashcam footage"
Yeah, you sound like you were in complete control - douche.
Well, considering that I was amazed that my driving didn't appear to be affected in the video, when I felt, while I was actually driving, that it was... it's amazing how easy it is to twist someone's words by quoting a phrase out of the context of its sentence, though, isn't it? Asshole.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Pot does not affect reflexes the way alcohol does, though I do believe it affects perception enough to be dangerous to drive at elevated concentrations in the body. Even someone who is totally baked NEVER stumbles around and slurs speech the way a drunk person does, but such a person certainly doesn't exhibit good enough judgement to operate a vehicle.
I followed a stoned driver to her home one evening way back when..i was invited over. That experience convinced me driving stoned is a very bad idea. This person took a "creative" route home, changed lanes randomly, drove 65km/h on a 100km/h freeway, tapped the brakes to the tune on the radio at one point, used the turn signals randomly...there was most definitely an impact on driving skills. Plus she invited *me* over, which in itself probably said something about her impaired judgement ;-). If I were to replay those events i would have given her a ride home and worried about getting her car later...
Just because you are not physically impaired by a drug does not mean you are not impaired, and just because you are not speeding does not mean you are not a danger. A stoned driver has no judgement skills and in one way is like a drunk person; his or her recollections of events while impaired are skewed. Other drugs may even make your reaction times better but severely impair judgement. Drivers on cocaine, heroin or meth have caused mayhem because of their erratic mental state.
The most dangerous form of impaired driving, in fact, is not physical impairment and does not involve any chemical impairment at all...that would be texting while driving. When a driver texts in a moving vehicle that person still has full physical abilities and quick reactions, however judgement is severely compromised due to the distraction. Talking without hands free is almost as bad. Distracted drivers behave very much like an amplified version of a stoned driver.
Driving stoned is illegal for a good reason and should remain that way...just because other impairment is worse doesn't mean it is ok. By all means, if you want to kick back and have a toke go ahead, not judging anyone for that, but a person should take some responsibility when driving out of consideration to others. Put away the mobile, get some rest, don't be drunk, don't be stoned, don't be high. If you can't do all of those, make alternative transportation plans.
So, how or what will the mechanism be to measure the level of THC in the blood or breath? Also, what will those numbers correspond to? No one knows and there has never been any published corollary numbers to back that up. It's always been, you are either high or not high.
I've been driving in Victoria since 1977, seat belts and random breath tests have been the most effective at cutting the road toll, period. Everything else just adds to that result. What they realised here in Vic 30yrs ago was that it's not sufficient to just make a law and start enforcing it, you have to change the public's attitude, unlike the 70's people are now regularly shamed by their friends and family if they choose to drink drive or fail to strap in their kids. The results of this deliberate science based effort by the TAC has been widely acclaimed as "ground breaking" by the rest of the world.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
It's actually 3Km over in Vic (used to be 5%). I've driven in both states many times, don't notice much difference except the level of traffic in Melb is much higher than Brisbane. Sydney is the worst city to drive in, roads are narrow too.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Sure cars are a lot safer now than in '69, consequently the Traffic Accident Commission (TAC) have mandatory safety ratings for cars, and they have heavily advertised the rating system for a couple of decades now. Also seat belts were made compulsory in Victoria in 1970, the subsequent drop in the road toll was very noticeable in the stats.
The success of the modern TAC here in Victoria is due to the bipartisan science based approach, but the on road results are why the public genuinely support them. The TAC came into it's current form in the late 80's, we know that random breath tests work because we were amongst the first in the world to introduce them. We watched our stats improve much faster than similar jurisdictions without the RBT's. A few years ago they added the drug lollypop to random testing but so far their use has been limited to the extent I haven't seen one yet despite several random tests in that period.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think so too, that's what happens when both sides of politics decide to attack the problem, rather than each other!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.