Slashdot Mirror
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.
The officer plays an Amy Schumer skit. If the person laughs they are to high to drive.....
The hippie going 45 in a 65 zone is high.
The dude sitting there waiting for the stop sign to turn green is high.
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.
long time alcoholic reaction times might still be reasonably ok even when way over the limit
Not really. What happens is that long time alcoholics become practiced at compensating for lousy reaction times.
Have gnu, will travel.
Yeah well, I wish they would practice on their side of the road.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Yea, but blood alcohol limits had a LOT of science behind them before they became law. There is very good evidence showing reaction times are impaired a minimum of 50% at what are now legal blood limits even in the most tolerant drunk.
The first person with the money to fight one of these blood THC levels is going to win because the limit is entirely arbitrary and there is in fact no evidence whatsoever that THC impairs reaction time. They'd have as much luck trying to convict someone for having whipped cream in the blood. You can thank that DEA level 1 classification for that as no one has been able to do any real research on cannabis. In time we will find out but the only reason the courts allowed blood alcohol to be used against you was because there was a TON of research and good hard science documenting the connection between blood alcohol and reaction time.
The legislature can't make something legal to consume being in your blood illegal to drive unless they can demonstrate that it impairs your ability to drive. People have forgotten all the effort it took to get the courts to let blood alcohol content be actionable. Blood alcohol took almost a decade of court wrangling before it was eventually allowed as evidence of impairment. Hell maybe the supreme court will allow it because the most of the court loves jacked booted thugery but IMO the government should have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the substance impairs your driving ability to make it illegal to be on it while driving.
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?
Back in the day, I'd cruise down Halsted with a joint in my hand, a beer between by thighs and black beauties in my blood stream with my Ramones cassette blasting. And I never had a problem with impaired driving.
Of course, there was the time I broke an axle and sheared off the entire exhaust system on my '68 Caprice while doing donuts in the snow in the mall parking lot at 3am, but it was only because I was distracted by the fact that none of the snowflakes hitting my windshield were exactly the same.
Goddamn nanny state wants to take away my right to drive fucked up. Not that I get fucked up any more. I'm too old for that now. But every so often, just for kicks, I crank up Rocket to Russia on my mp3 player and do donuts in my mobility scooter down the paper goods aisle at the Wal-Mart.
https://youtu.be/CVQfVtzFd4U
You are welcome on my lawn.
Oh, wait, do you know why alcohol and marijuana have an effect on the body? It's because the body is receptive to it's presence. Have you thought about why the body is receptive to these substances? It's because the body produces these same substances on its own.
This line of reasoning is flat out wrong in general. Plenty of receptors in the human body will react to many different molecules, including many that do not normally exist in the body but may have other molecules with similar shapes (or even just similar in one part that sticks out from the molecule).
Ethanol is a pretty simple chemical and appears in a lot of places in biology, including human metabolism. However, the CB1 and CB2 receptors that respond to THC are not in the body because the body has THC, but because of endocannabinoids like AG2 and others. And the body doesn't react the same, as different endocannabinoids will affect the two different receptors in a different ratio and affect additional receptors that THC doesn't.
Just as realistic as teenagers going on about how they are wonderful at multitasking.
Alcoholics are a mess at everything - very sad to watch it happen.