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Comment by deckar01 | Hacker News Reader

Lots of behaviors impair your driving ability. A study found that being dehydrated caused the same number of driving errors as being drunk [0]. I'm sure it would be easy to make a field sobriety test for blood water content, but they don't, because safety isn't the real reason these laws get made. It's just public pressure to enforce moral values.

[0]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11547199/Not-dr...

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That study [0] had so many flaws it's not even funny.

1. It only had 12 participants 2. One of those participants was excluded from the final results 3. They didn't test the participants' (or a separate group's) driving ability while under the influence of alcohol (they used a simulator, so it would have been fine), and so you really can't use the results to make any comparisons between dehydration and alcohol use 4. The study was funded by the European Hydration Institute

[0]: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/20400...

I kind of love that biased test results funded by Big Water are a thing.

Oh trust me, "Big Water" is very much a thing. I've met a guy who runs a coke bottling plant; he could hardly believe his luck. They literally just run the existing stuff dry, and it's got massive margins.

The article you cite says:

> "To put our results into perspective, the levels of driver errors we found are of a similar magnitude to those found in people with a blood alcohol content of 0.08%"

This is just comparing against the lower limit of what we legally allow. Clearly, many drunk drivers are far drunker than this.

But in any case, I don't think it's "just public pressure to enforce moral values". You can't legally drive on Ambien, but this is a prescribed drug that I don't think people have a moral issue with.

While I think the dehydration example above is probably a stretch since it's not really as bad as alcohol, there are other things that are. I'm pretty sure driving with lack of sleep is pretty bad. But it's just not practical to test for it as far as I know.

> safety isn't the real reason these laws get made. It's just public pressure to enforce moral values

Oh please. Alcohol accounts for 30ish percent of driving fatalities. Even if dehydration is equally dangerous (a big if) it’s still far less prevalent. Maybe that’s the reason there’s no law about it.

There are other things that lead to driving accidents, like lack of sleep or perhaps even needing to use the restroom. Ideally, a field test would cover most of these.

Someone just over the legal alcohol limit could be less impaired than a drowsy, sober driver, but the former would be more likely to be blamed for an accident than the latter, especially in areas with really low limits (e.g. it's 0.05% here in Utah).

>Lots of behaviors impair your driving ability. A study found that being dehydrated caused the same number of driving errors as being drunk [0].

On June 12th Colorado alone surpassed 1 billion dollars in legal marijuana sales [1]

Let's be overly optimistic and assume an average customer in Colorado has spent $5,000 that means you have 200,000 customers. That's 200,000 people potentially driving while high.

How many people, of legal driving age, are dehydrated to the point of intoxication in/visiting Colorado during that time period? I'm guessing less than a thousand, probably less than 100.

[1](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/colorado-cannabis-sales-hit-...)

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