Pot. Alcohol. Texting. Talking on the phone. They all impair you terribly while driving. That does not require prohibition. That requires taking the human out of the loop for driving ~2.5 tons of metal down the highway.
And then we need to look at "What happens when we have 5 million people unemployed in a short time, due to rapid advancements in automation?" The Democrats aren't looking at this, and nor are the Republicans. Really, no party is looking at this. We have a few economists and scientific-y types talking about Mincome, but aside some experiments in Europe, it's being drowned out.
What do we have that can absorb such a hit on our financial system and not drop in a recession? How do we make sure these people don't simply sink when the 'bots come to take their job?
They won't so much sink as they will just never float.
(Big, fat /s on that, just in case it's somehow not obvious.)
While I understand why a "highness-measuring" device would be nice, I think this underlies a sore point in our policing and governing. It's not enough for the officer to make a judgement on whether the citizen is too impaired to drive, we must have a quantitative measurement. I think both a subjective judgement and any one quantitative measurement can overlook a ton of factors, but one is better at negating legal repercussions.
Basically, we either accept an invasive test, or we can't enforce the law. Which is 100% different than what it was before.
http://www.larryformanlaw.com/blog/can-the-police-take-my-bl...
Pre-legalization, the police had no way to discern if a driver was high.
Post-legalization the police still have no way to discern if a driver is high.
The only difference is pre-legalization, they could arrest you for having some bud in your pocket. Now that can't do that.
I wonder why they don't go back to doing a sobriety test for detecting intoxication though. It worked ok before breathalyzers, if you can pass the test than presumably you are ok to drive.
1 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073804... 2 - http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/48/3/608.short
The evidence of the stuff stays in your system much longer than the impairment. There is also the issue of "tolerance" and or how the amount of substance present in urine or blood relates to the supposed impairment.
>So now you effectively have no way to prove whether or not someone was breaking that law.
But you can still perform an objective test to determine if someone is currently impaired. They need to design and validate a motor skills and reaction time test. I'm not sure why anyone cares more about why someone is impaired than they do about whether someone is impaired.
I agree that the "why" isn't that important (or at all), but what is the alternative?
It could hypothetically be as simple as a video game driving test. It could be some other abstract measurement of reaction time.
I don't understand the question. A driving skills / reaction time test, is an alternative.
It's easy to target people who are engaging in unnecessary actions at the expense of driving capability. Drinking, using drugs, and texting fall under this category. People are much less accepting of punishments for things seemingly outside of personal control. Imagine the embarrassment for law makers when some mothers' advocacy group attacks them for banning all new mothers from driving (except those rare exceptions who function well on <4 hours of sleep.) Or the backlash for hardworking people getting arrested regularly because their multiple jobs keep them from getting an amount of sleep that makes driving permissible.
Nope! The only relevant crime is possession, and "in your bloodstream" doesn't count.
The law is to prevent dangerous driving. It doesn't matter if you have a sip of beer or a 6 pack, if it impairs you, that's against the law. HOWEVER, once your BAC reaches 0.08, that is proof enough of being impaired. Lower than 0.08, then they must show that you are impaired. And if you fail the sobriety field tests, you are impaired.
My point is, if you can't tell if someone is impaired, even after field tests, then maybe they aren't impaired. Regardless of what you suspect they may or may not have eaten. If they are impaired, the field tests will show and you can arrest them.
I see no point in making this easier for law enforcement. I don't think we need more specific laws, that just opens up new questions and loopholes.
1) It provides a definitive test which would later stand in court (if needed). 2) Gives you more time to "sober up" if you actually have been drinking.
At the time, I remember thinking it was good information. In hindsight, it's rather funny to think it came from the High School teachers who were teaching Driver's Ed.
Going back to the Michigan laws, Implied Consent does apply there today. However, the implied consent of chemical testing only appears to apply if you've been arrested. You can, however, still be fined for declining the field sobriety test while not under arrest.
I suspect that Canada will prohibit edibles for this reason.
But if it's less harmful than alcohol, a substance which is legal for consumption and moderated by the government, why should it be illegal? What's your justification for saying marijuana should be banned for reasons of harm, when you can't establish that it's more harmful than more easily available alternatives?
Or are you also arguing that alcohol should be banned, as well?
Edit: To answer your initial question, the logic here is "One harmful substance is legal, thus other substances which are less harmful should probably also be legal".
The law hardly matter in these cases, people do what they will do. If edibles are illegal kids will just make them at home.
How is this any different for weed, or anything else?
In the state I live in: "No person may endanger the safety of any person or property by the negligent operation of a vehicle."
If you're endangering people and property while dead sober, you get arrested anyway. Why does the content of their blood fundamentally matter?
If someone is swerving around and kills me, why should I care if he was drunk, stoned, or just not paying attention? I'm just as dead. Its not like I'm any less dead if he was stoned or more dead if he was drunk.
Remember its not 1930s era prohibition anymore. Plenty of video recorders, cheap.
I'm willing to trade "arrest stoners who haven't crashed yet" for "also arrest dead sober idiots who can't drive"
I'm just not seeing a problem. Other than the criminal justice system, who benefits by DUI laws? Clearly the general public isn't any safer because dangerous driving is already illegal via the negligence law.
And I think the introspection part could be important alongside the enforcement part, again because the idea is that people might routinely be overconfident in their ability to drive safely after consuming intoxicants. So they don't necessarily think they're endangering others as much as they are.
(That might be possible to measure empirically, and it might turn out that some existing laws are too strict under that rationale.)
I remember a children's museum exhibit that was about reaction times, basically trying to justify to kids why they shouldn't drink and drive when they got older. The interesting issue that it highlighted was that fast reaction times can be very important for avoiding some kinds of accidents, and even a small impairment to your reaction time could increase risk a lot in a way that you might not anticipate. But I also remember that when I saw that exhibit, I thought "hmmmm, why don't driving tests test someone's baseline reaction time to make sure that everybody who's a licensed driver can actually react to stuff quickly?" and "hmmmm, why don't they make a toy that you could use to test your own level of impairment before driving, rather than only relying on estimating your blood alcohol content?".
Edit: someone already suggested both of these ideas in another thread above!