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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't care if people smoke in their homes, but tell me how you are going to stop people from driving stoned and killing me.

Because people are arrogant about it and think they are perfectly fine and that it's not like alcohol - right now the fear of being caught with it in the car slows down that arrogance, once it's legal it's going to happen all the time.

Also there has to be some severe penalty for public smoking because I don't want you smoking it next to the playground just because you are now allowed to.

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"I don't care if people smoke in their homes, but tell me how you are going to stop people from driving stoned and killing me."

In addition to the fact that marijuana doesn't actually significantly increase driving risk, the overall driving fatalities may actually decrease if people switch to smoking instead of drinking or using benzos. Driving fatalities have actually fallen more in medical marijuana states than across the rest of the country:

http://ftp.iza.org/dp6112.pdf

That being said there is some uncertainty because driving after mixing alcohol with marijuana is significantly more dangerous than driving after consuming either alone, but so far all the data seems to suggest that if anything legalizing marijuana will actually save thousands of lives per year.

Just go with "You'll get an effing DUI if you do" and you'll pay the normal alcohol tax on being an asshole and lose your license and if you hurt someone you'll be in mega bonus lawsuit land. Stop with this BS "MJ is safer than alkehol", who cares, if you're disabled, you're disabled, DONT....DRIVE. Also, drive stoned for me and prove it doesn't do anything. My friends couldn't pull it off with college aged reactions, you must be superman if you can.

I believe that public intoxication laws are already in place to prevent the people that insist on using marjiuana on playgrounds.

Also, I don't see how making the drug legal would affect the amount of people that choose to drive while under its effects. Being caught with alcohol while driving is almost (if not as) bad, and yet it doesn't stop people from drunk driving.

Driving under the influence and public intoxication are already laws.

If the current penalties remained in place for smoke-driving there would be no increased incentive to drive while stoned. In general, I think the problems you bring up are perfectly valid, but I see no fundamental reason society should deal with them differently than with alcohol.

I believe the problem he's referring to is not simply making it a crime to smoke and drive, but rather the difficulty in determining if someone is actually stoned since there is not currently a BAC test equivalent.

If there's no way to determine if someone is driving stoned, then what's the point of prohibiting it?

Further, reckless driving is illegal, even if someone has no intoxicants in their system.

It's not that scary.

The thing is a lot of people exaggerate the effects of marijuana to being this wholly disorienting experience. In truth, it just makes everything seem hilarious and almost every food combination a scientific discovery. Moreover, unlike alcohol where you feel empowered (i.e. go out and drive), it more or less gives you a "not right now" feeling and you stay put.

That being said, there will always be unintelligent misinformed people who take it too far. Don't let it frighten you.

Good thinking. Make sure we never allow people to do anything that may cause them to be an impaired driver. Can't let anyone get too tired, or drink too much, or eat too much.

Your post screams of canna-phobia. It's like people having gut reactions to homosexuality because they're conditioned against it.

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