Stoned drivers are safer than drunk ones, new federal data show

I wonder how a cop would react if you started singing the alphabet backwards.

Because refusing to obey a police officer who's considering arresting you is such a sober decision.

It really doesn't matter the age, ability, or whatever - as long as a person CAN reach the minimum requirements to drive on the road, they should be allowed to chose to do so. I don't see a need to discriminate by any means other than performance.

If we don't have the science, technology, nor a fair way to test, I'm not sure how making pot-specific laws is going to help do anything other than make people feel like something has been done.

At least with better controls and better general laws, it makes everyone safer. People that can't drive accordingly, regardless of any drug, probably shouldn't be driving at all.

Full disclosure: I have been pulled over and arrested for "driving while ability impaired" (essentially the non-alcohol DUI)

When I was going to school in upstate NY, I was pulled over as I drove my friend home. The cop thought we smelled like weed (fair enough, my friend had some on him, I was sober and not holding). So he pulls me out of the car and makes me do a "field sobriety test" which consisted of the following (no joke):

-Standing on one leg for 10 seconds

-Walking in a straight line in the dark while he flashed a light at you like a strobe

-Having to close your eyes and then open them when you "thought" 30 seconds had passed

-Having to recite as much as the alphabet backwards as you can

I'm not a coordinated person in general but I had never been pulled over or issued a traffic ticket before. But they then use this circus act as the basis to say "Hey, time for a blood test because you might be high" and then they take you to a hospital. You can refuse the blood test but you get your license suspended for like a month immediately and I needed to drive to work and school. I hadn't smoked in a bit so I thought I'd be good for the blood test and that I'd be fine in court. Of course, it's fallacious to use the blood sample because it can have trace THC from days ago. So you, like I did, can get slapped with a charge based on the fact that you smoked last weekend and then - how dare you - decided to drive days after the fact.

I had to go to court and then was found guilty based on this erroneous evidence. I had to go to "addiction counseling" where the psych told me I exhibited absolutely no addictive symptoms yet I still had to attend. I got one of my scholarships revoked simply based on the charges against me. I had to pay fines and then sign statements at the end of my "counseling" that I would refrain from drug use and be a productive member of society (it actually was worded like that).

I'm not really sure what the solution is. It will be interesting to see what the accident rates / fatalities from stoned drivers are in the coming years. All I know is the current system is a farce and only used to drive revenue to the state.

While the conclusion is clear, it's also misleading. No one disputes that you can get too stoned to drive, that isn't the issue that matters. What matters is whether those too stoned to drive drive anyway like they do on alcohol. Anecdotally from decades of experience I can say they don't, pot doesn't destroy your ability to judge your state of mind so there's no reason to treat it with special exceptions like we do for alcohol. Most long term smokers drive while high, but not while impaired. High != impaired just as drinking one beer doesn't destroy your ability to drive safely.

Talented musicians of all sort can learn how to improvise, but it's a learned skill, not simply "hey, different music means I do something different!" It's an acquired skill that means training your ear to create cohesive melodies.

Ostensibly, yes. In practice, usually only one person at a time is playing a solo over a predetermined and repeating chord progression.

Having known a lot of older daily smokers (decades) and older alcoholics, alcohol is a lot more damaging, both mentally and physically. I've never seen anyone die in their 40s from marijuana, but I've seen a few people eventually lose that battle with their liver or their kidneys from alcohol. Older alcoholics can be almost shockingingly stupid, too - far worse than young alcoholics.

I do know a few individuals who have smoked pot regularly for decades. I don't see cannabis having had any negative effects on them or their families. They are intelligent, successful people in long term stable relationships.

Not sure that's true: if the alcohol was still in your blood that long, it would still be affecting you and impairing function.

For alcohol, a comparable test might look at long-term changes in liver biochemistry associated with alcohol consumption. In that case, there probably wouldn't be any correlation with accident rates.

Or you could just be walking while black (or hispanic, etc.).

All that takes is living out of town and walking down the main route to your house and someone stopping and smelling alcohol.

It is great to put that theoretical thing in place. But people do, occasionally, mess up. I rarely went to bars because of transportation - others, not so much. Alcohol impairs judgement as, and if the options aren't there and easy to use, it is more likely that folks will drive drunk.

Actually, there are terpenes in cannabis that mitigate many of the confusing effects, which can be found in foods such as black peppercorns and pine nuts. Pliny the Elder wrote about this; see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3165946/ So yes, there are ways to get "less high."

Not advocating that driving while high/texting/tired is a good idea, just trying to enlighten about some of the fascinating science behind Cannabis.

The question becomes what's Stoned? Detectable is not a reasonable limit nor is can't stand up.

anxiety, depression, etc...

there's some overlap here, some people use cannabis to prevent/control seizures, to treat anxiety or depression, and don't feel side effects.

The experience of the common person who has tried cannabis once or twice and turned away isn't necessarily anything like the experience of someone who benefits from it.

You wouldn't say that a person with ADHD shouldn't drive on ADHD meds, but for anyone else, that would be effectively like driving on cocaine.

Some people should, in fact, not be driving while not under the influence of cannabis or another treatment for conditions that could make them unsafe drivers.

Have you taken Dramamine (the regular drowsy version)? If I take 1 pill I can sort of keep awake but I wouldn't try to drive unless it was an emergency. Taking 2 pills makes me so drowsy that I would not drive safely by any chance.

Those are the recommended dosages by the way, so no need to consume the whole bottle or box of that like with cough syrup. And that's just one of the myriad of different things you can get over the counter that can easily impair your driving.

So yes, I think the analogy is right to a degree (like all analogies). Even though marijuana does definitely change the way you perceive things and thus driving might not be something recommended to do, the GP's point is that a lot of people already drive under the influence of a lot of other substances, some of them potentially much more dangerous than marijuana.

Obviously part of the problem is that different people will react differently to marijuana, so like stated elsewhere in the thread, a regular user (like a functional alcoholic) might be able to drive "ok" and have no accidents but someone that is trying it for the first time, getting a particularly potent batch and then trying to drive is going to increase the chances of an accident greatly.

That doesn't mean I condone being fucked up (with whatever) and driving, but the GP has a point in that we are already living in a world where people are driving and doing other dangerous things while under the influence of "stuff". That also explains partly why driving is so dangerous and why so many people die each year from a driving-related incident.

Edit: So maybe we shouldn't be single-ing out marijuana as "the" bad stuff that causes accidents while behind the wheel and take a more "big-picture" kind of view. One of the reasons why self-driving cars are a good idea.

True, which points to the fact that it would be useful to have a well-understood BAC-like scale for marijuana usage, especially as the drug becomes more and more legal to use.

Clearly there's a difference between having one beer and driving an hour later compared to getting behind the wheel while nearly passed-out drunk. Lots of people have a decent approximate sense of what 0.08 BAC is when it comes to alcohol consumption, but everyone who is "high" is just "high" without some sort of well-defined scale.

"And after adjusting for age, gender, race and alcohol use, drivers who tested positive for marijuana were no more likely to crash than who had not used any drugs or alcohol prior to driving."

Edit: Just in case in the future anyone comes across my comment out of context of this thread, I'd like to add that without seeing further research I'm not personally convinced by that statement.

And after adjusting for age, gender, race and alcohol use, drivers who tested positive for marijuana were no more likely to crash than who had not used any drugs or alcohol prior to driving.

Here is a thought experiment. You are a passenger in a car, chained to the seat. Would you rather the driver drink shots of ethanol, smoke marijuana cigarettes, swallow antihistamine pills, or log in to Twitter/Facebook via mobile phone? Assume that you wish to minimize both risk of death and the severity of nonfatal injuries.

I suspect majority of drivers testing positive for cannabis were not actually remotely close to being stoned at the time they were driving plays a huge role too (possibly also overzealous demographic controls). That's consistent with the study authors' observations that other studies based on accidents which rely on self-reported cannabis use show it to have a large effect on accident rates, and studies which rely on testing to show it has little or no discernible impact on accident rates. They consider the studies relying on testing to be superior in construction. Based on the well-established fact that cannabis use tends to show up in standard tests days after its main effects have worn off, I beg to differ.

What evidence is there that the increased cannabis use is causing these crashes, considering you have to control for the fact that more people in general are using cannabis, so in almost any population (drivers in fatal car crashes; fast food employees; school teachers; whatever) you could expect to see an increase in use.

If there was a general increase in accidents, I think you would have a point, but all this conclusively demonstrates is that there has been an increase of marijuana usage among the population of Washington. The thing about how these drug tests work, is that they do not test impairment or if someone was high at the time, but if they were high within the past few hours to days. I think you're misunderstanding, that even if there is THC in someone's bloodstream, it does not mean they are high. It is possible that none of the drivers in the study were high at the time of their crashes, and all of them smoked the day before. It is also possible that every single one was high during the collision. Due to the nature of the testing, the linked study is not very conclusive on at least what you're trying to prove from it.

This isn't "a flaw", it's a fatal flaw that invalidates the study. You're missing the point; saying marijuana-related accidents is itself an invalid statement as there is not way to quantify that correctly. You can therefore not conclude anything from marijuana-related anything other than people who want to control other people are happy to use invalid statistics to try and impose their will where it isn't welcome.

> Why try and encourage something that is clearly dangerous and irresponsible?

Because it is not dangerous and irresponsible, that's your assumption, it is not a fact in evidence.

As a US citizen I will tell you this is false. We have basically no national traffic laws.

Your local state, city or other local government may have passed a law like this.

For example, in my area, it was made illegal to stay in the left lane moving more slowly than those behind you -- you must yield to the right if they want to go more quickly.

But some 99% of Americans do not live under this local law I'm discussing.

I don't even think that pot makes people drive slowly. IMO it's a result of stoned people being afraid of giving the police any excuse to pull them over.