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Comment by Sparkle-san | Hacker News Reader

Got any real sources? I've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.

> I've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.

I knew a guy who drove home from bars unquestionably over the legal limit (example: 4-5 drinks in 90 minutes) every single weekend for years without getting caught or getting in accident.

It doesn’t mean he wasn’t impaired.

That's not quite the same though. The claim is that because I'm a habitual user, I'm always impaired. Which amounts to over 100k miles of impaired driving over the last decade.

Being freshly high is probably 2 quick beers, I'd think I was baseline after maybe 45 minutes. A massive edible might be 5, and I'd take like 3 hours I'd guess.

Alcohol is so much more impairing. I think just being a daily user isn't the issue. It's the proximity to last use and obviously quantity.

Planning, good sense, and caution go a long way to compensate for physical impairment. Weed is different from booze in that booze increases risk taking, which makes driving such a danger. But that doesn’t mean weed doesn’t impair in some material way compared to baseline.

Your average driver on alcohol: goes 100 miles per hour into a tree

Your average driver on weed: drives 5 miles per hour to the taco bell drive thru

You're only expected to crash 500 or so times per 100 million miles as the base rate[0]. If you were impaired enough to have 2x or 3x the risk of crashing then it's entirely possible that you wouldn't crash, or that other factors would play a larger role.

[0] https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...

You probably are compared to your baseline self (another comment goes more extensively on this subject) but maybe you have enough driving skills and common sense to minimize the risks somewhat.

we both know one does not get impaired by spliff or two the same way she does after drink or two.

In the south people drive drunk over the legal alcohol limit all the time, most don’t crash. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

It depends on the level of your habitual use. A 5mg gummy every evening is probably fine.

I’ve seen plenty of people who are essentially using THC vapes like nicotine vapes, in that they use them every few hours and start to get anxious if they don’t. Stoned driving has become normalized - between seeing people lighting up behind the wheel on snap map, seeing it on TV (this happened in The Rehearsal season 1), and seeing it in person, it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.

If you’re high all day every day, that may be your normal, but it doesn’t mean you’re competent to drive.

In my personal experience, it took a very long time to fully get through a high dose of THC - usually at least a full night sleep, but sometimes more like two, before my reaction times came back. Notably, it takes much longer for the impairment of THC to wear off than the subjectively enjoyable experience of being high, so you can “sober up” but still be impaired.

If you’ve been getting high every day for 10 years, it is hard to take seriously that you would know if you’re impaired. Kind of like vegans who haven’t tasted dairy for 10 years tend not to be reliable judges of the quality of vegan mayo - how could they possibly know?

I've been high basically for 15 years straight and was a professional athlete during that time in a sport that requires a lot of coordination. I know many other athletes that are heavy users, the majority of the best athletes I've ever known were actually. So how do you think that works?

I don't trust anyone else on the road because all of you are comically bad drivers compared to someone like me.

> Kind of like vegans who haven’t tasted dairy for 10 years tend not to be reliable judges of the quality of vegan mayo - how could they possibly know?

Wait, how is mayo, vegan or not, related to dairy?

Dairy is a category that depending on context may or may not include eggs. In this case the distinction doesn’t matter. Vegans wouldn’t have experience with strictly defined dairy or eggs.

TIL! I am not American.

A perfect vegan alternative to mayonnaise is aioli, which consists only of garlic, olive oil, and salt.

For some reason, people lump eggs in with dairy, presumably because they're unaware of the difference between hens and cows. You'd have to have quite a lot of detectable THC in your system to confuse the two, but here we are, people think that eggs are the same as milk.

To be fair, my milkman delivers eggs as well as milk, cream, and butter, but they come from a totally different farm.

If we're doing anecdotes I'm sure there are lots of drunk drivers with spotless records.

I understand that you're taking issue with the idea of always being impaired, but the article indicates that there's a pretty clear association between having ingested THC and being in a car crash.

There’s also an association with having drank water and been in a car crash. This on its own can’t reasonably inform any opinions, more context is required.

Enough with the pedantry please:

"Driving under the influence of cannabis was associated with a significantly increased risk of motor vehicle collisions compared with unimpaired driving (odds ratio 1.92 (95% confidence interval 1.35 to 2.73); P=0.0003); we noted heterogeneity among the individual study effects (I2=81)".

From https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e536

> There’s also an association with having drank water and been in a car crash

This is blatantly intellectually dishonest. If 100% of people drink water then it’s not surprising when 100% of people in car crashes have been drinking water.

If less than 40% of the population has impairment levels of THC at any given time but 40% of deceased car crash drivers have impairment levels of THC in their blood, you can’t pretend that THC use is equivalent to drinking water.

The mental gymnastics being done in this thread to try to ignore this study are fascinating.

> If less than 40% of the population has impairment levels of THC at any given time but 40% of deceased car crash drivers have impairment levels

You're looking at two different populations in this and your other comments, drawing a false equivalence. The study is over a 6 year period, over which 103 people (40%) tested positive for THC. You're saying that because the number of people who self-reported consuming THC in the last year is 20%, that means the result of the study is eye popping and shocking because the number is 40%. But you cannot directly infer elevated risk just because a subgroup has a higher prevalence than the general population without controlling for exposure and confounders. Especially considering what we are talking about is people self-reporting they are criminals.

Moreover, fatal crashes are not randomly distributed across age groups or vehicle types, and younger people, because they are not as experienced, they drive more often, in smaller cars with fewer safety features, are more likely both to smoke THC, and die in crashes even while sober. So there's a strong sampling bias here you're not accounting for.

And this isn't downplaying the results, it's pointing out its limitations of the study and warning you not to read into it what isn't there. You seem to be shocked by the results which should cause you to dig deeper into the study. I would say the most surprising thing here is they found nothing changed before and after legalization.

> If less than 40% of the population has impairment levels of THC at any given time but 40% of deceased car crash drivers have impairment levels of THC in their blood

Yes, IF. That was my point.

Don't we need baseline levels to see the association?

You think 40% of the population is using? That seems like a pretty big reach to me.

I have no idea, but we should know the baseline if we want to know the effect

> I've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.

n sample size of 1 does not prove anything.

Source? Source? Got any source about me? Yeah well those statistics only deal with other people who aren’t me, so I guess you’re not really trusting the science :/

It is very noticeable to basically everyone when you consume cannabis regularly.

I don't (I find cannabis unpleasant) but I don't think this is at all true.

I think serious studies would be strongly preferred here, as compared to anecdotes or conjecture. I don’t even know if I disagree with your stance, it’s just an absence of data is not convincing.

not exactly. Depends how you consume it. Smoking, yes probably. The other forms of cannabis are less obvious. They are clearer highs without smell or smoke and much less burnout.

Less coughing and effects of smoke, but the burnout is definitely due to daily THC, even if you vape it or do dabs.

(To be clear, I don't think every daily user is a burnout.)

i think you're confusing burnout with 'a' Burnout. "burnout' refers to the coming down off of a weed high. 'A' burnout is a person who is so rarely sober that they are essentially always in a state of burning out. With drugs stronger than marijuana this can be permanent or nearly so.

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