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AAA Study: Blood THC Levels After Smoking Pot Are Useless In Defining 'Too High To Drive' (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Blood tests that try to quantify marijuana use are in fact useless at assessing how impaired a driver is, according to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. The study found that people with low blood amounts of THC -- or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, the main psychoactive component of pot -- may still act as if they're really stoned. On the other hand, some people may have THC measurements off the charts yet still act normally. The finding is critical because several states have already set legal limits for the amount of THC a person can have in their blood while driving. AAA concluded that such limits are "arbitrary and unsupported by science, which could result in unsafe motorists going free and others being wrongfully convicted for impaired driving." The conclusion echoes that of other researchers that also noted no correlation between blood THC levels and impairment. Still, there is a need to deter people from smoking pot while driving, AAA argues, as it can impair driving. It recommends that until scientifically valid measures of impairments are put into place, law enforcement should use a combination of behavior and psychological tests to assess whether drivers who use marijuana are safe to drive.
Many people react differently to alcohol as well. But you have to draw the line somewhere. If we get the drunks and stoners off the road, is it really a big tragedy if a few semi-sober people are removed as well?
The same things could be said about Blood Alcohol levels. Someone unaccustomed to drinking can become severely impaired even with low amounts of alcohol while long time alcoholic reaction times might still be reasonably ok even when way over the limit.
I'm all for the legalization of pot nation wide, but I'm also against impaired drivers being allowed to menace the roads. Smoke to your hearts content, but don't smoke and drive.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Big difference, drunk people are physically impaired (motor skills) and believe that they are more capable then they are
Stoned people are mentally impaired (panic easily, misjudge situations) and believe that they are less able to drive than they are
I would much rather live in a world full of stoned drivers than drunk drivers
And PLEASE take Anslinger's rotting penis out of your mouth for long enough to understand the failures of the war on drugs. It has derailed the lives of millions of people by limiting their ability to receive student loans, decent employment and fair treatment.
But you have to draw the line somewhere.
Yeah, you measure reflexes and decision making skills, and take them off the road if they are unsafe.
But doing so would make AARP and voters mad, and we all know stoners don't bother to vote, so you make up arbitrary (and wrong) limits for chemicals, not related to the safety of the driver. Great system.
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That might work if other factors were not in play. Some prescription meds will screw with your pupil dilation while not impairing you at all outside of perhaps causing your low light vision to suffer a bit. Or be better. And while a similar test might be OK in most cases we need something that shows how high you were when something happened and it needs to be free of false positives. I have no idea how to do it but it is important to avoid ruining peoples lives for doing something that is legal days or weeks prior to an accident that has nothing to do with what happened. At this time it seems that we have many people that want a test simply because they want to say they have it and false positives are not a big worry since they dont really care about the real reason for 'why' they just want to push an agenda or inflate arrest numbers, but I suppose those are kind of the same.
I dont smoke weed on the regular but I do a few times a month. And when I do its legal. And I never drive when high. The current tests would say that a legit accident (as in: shit happens, not negligence) that I was in was the result of being high despite it being false. I could of been high 24 hours prior, a week, or a month, but if some folks get their way that is the same thing as being stoned as fuck at that very moment. Insane. Do we put people away for DUI when they got ripped a few days prior but were 100% sober when they were involved in an accident?
Seriously? You're cool with people being arbitrarily punished for a crime they didn't commit?
In fact there have been some studies that show stoned drivers slow down enough to fully compensate for their impairment, and so are no more likely than a sober driver to cause an accident (though they might be annoying to get stuck behind.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one that sees MADD as a neo-prohibition organization. As much as people claim that breathalyzer tests demonstrate intoxication I thought I'd be able to find plenty of evidence to support this. All I could seem to find is a lot of people giving identical BAC levels and their effects on the body but with no citations. This leads me to believe that if there was a study then it must be very old since these numbers did not seem to change with the age of the articles I found and the numbers are so pervasive that it seems no one has bothered to question them.
What I also found was ample evidence that roadside BAC testing is terribly inaccurate and is so poorly regulated on how it should be tested that people have successfully challenged such testing in courts. This is much like how people challenge speeding tickets by showing the radar speed detectors have been poorly maintained and rarely checked for accuracy. There is very little or no regulation on BAC testing for law enforcement.
I believe that if the charge is for intoxication then test for intoxication. Having the suspect try to touch their nose, balance on one foot, or recite the alphabet on camera seems like a much better test of driving ability than BAC levels. But then MADD lobbied for the laws to be changed that its not intoxication that they are testing for, it's BAC. Which brings me back to what I found before, I've found it difficult to find a study that correlates BAC levels to one's ability to drive.
Personally, I don't care if your BAC is 100%. If you can drive the speed limit, keep in your lane, signal your turns, etc. then bottoms up. Also on a personal note I believe it wasn't drunk driving laws that reduced drunk driving deaths, it was the realization by the public that driving drunk is not funny any more. It's no longer "cute" to have a pint too many and drive home.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
In fact there have been some studies that show stoned drivers slow down enough to fully compensate for their impairment, and so are no more likely than a sober driver to cause an accident (though they might be annoying to get stuck behind.
There are also studies that show that smoking is healthy for you, but the vast majority of studies show the opposite.
People who take drugs, be it alcohol or something else, doesn't do so to become better drivers.
Even some completely sober people have trouble with handling all traffic situations and since there are other people on the road you can't always compensate by driving slower.
If you are unsure about if the drugs have left your body (Are you still hungover?) then you aren't capable of driving.
Of course people will do stupid things. The question is at what point does it stop being necessary to per-emptively punish them when they aren't actually causing a problem.
Someone going 35 in a 55 with no hazards on can be ticketed by a police officer for reckless driving whether they are drunk, stoned, or sober. Given that road fatalities have dropped dramatically in states where marijuana is legalized is it really needed to catch people at checkpoints who aren't actually driving in an impaired fashion?
Any war on has to fail. Because you cannot wage a war against an idea or a problem. War on terror, war on drugs, war on poverty, war on sanity... ok, that last one pretty much worked out.
This isn't a military campaign where you can succeed by throwing ammo at something or someone 'til it croaks. Ideas may be bulletproof, but problems are simply so intangible that you cannot simply bomb them away.
You have to solve them. But that requires thinking instead of beating something.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How about the old fashioned way, we punish people for reckless driving and accidents. The officer can ticket for reckless driving at his discretion already. If your driving isn't showing impairment you aren't too intoxicated to drive. If your driving is showing impairment it really doesn't matter why, you need to be taken off the road.
... have trouble selecting and interpreting medical tests.
And it turns out cops with no medical training whatsoever are even worse. Who'd have thunk it?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Lane discipline (or a lack thereof) is responsible for most accidents, which is why law enforcement's obsession with speeding is so obnoxious. The fact that police would rather be sitting on the side of the road clocking for speeders (because it's easy and hard to contest in court) and ignoring all of the inattentive drivers changing lanes without looking or signaling, failing to yield the passing lane and encouraging passing on the right, and so on is a damn shame.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
If I didn't already post in this discussion, I'd mod you up. If they are actually concerned about safety, the guy going 55 in the left most of 6 lanes of traffic while everyone else is doing 65 is the one causing the most danger. If you're adamant about people going the speed limit, it's still the ones tailgating, cutting off other drivers, failing to signal, and intentionally blocking other drivers from changing lanes that cause the most problems.
It seems to me the majority of traffic problems/jams are the fault of the drivers and not just traffic volume... people left-lane bombing (entering onto the highway and pushing their way all the way to the left lane, despite the fact traffic is not flowing at top speed anyway), people right-lane bombing (trying to pass in front of people who were already waiting to exit to the right); every lane change when traffic is already moving slowly, not being in the lane you need to be in before traffic slows. Those right lane bombers slow every lane they pass through to get to the right lane - cumulatively f#@king up the flow of traffic badly, causing 6 lanes of traffic (in my case) to become slow and go because of a single popular exit. The most blatant example of people causing the problem is gridlock. There's just simply no excuse to enter the intersection unless you are certain you can clear it before the light changes.
It will never get better until it's mandatory that all cars be self driving. The flow of traffic (and the danger caused both by people changing lanes abruptly and without signaling, and the ones actively tailgating to not allow people to change lanes) will never improve unless and until everyone is actually on the same page.... and that will never happen.
Stupid sexy Flanders.