cannabisnews.com: Everyone Agrees Driving While High is Bad
function share_this(num) {
 tit=encodeURIComponent('Everyone Agrees Driving While High is Bad');
 url=encodeURIComponent('http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/29/thread29109.shtml');
 site = new Array(5);
 site[0]='http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[1]='http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit.php?url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[2]='http://digg.com/submit?topic=political_opinion&media=video&url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[3]='http://reddit.com/submit?url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 site[4]='http://del.icio.us/post?v=4&noui&jump=close&url='+url+'&title='+tit;
 window.open(site[num],'sharer','toolbar=0,status=0,width=620,height=500');
 return false;
}






Everyone Agrees Driving While High is Bad
Posted by CN Staff on May 31, 2017 at 05:32:13 PT
By Keith Humphreys
Source: Washington Post
USA -- While several states have legalized using marijuana, nobody is in favor of driving under its influence. But as states crack down on high driving, they're struggling to figure out what counts as driving high, and how they can reliably test for it.Currently, if police determine they have reason to suspect a driver of being under the influence -- perhaps due to erratic driving or other behavior -- they can administer a field sobriety test. But unlike alcohol, there's no on-scene breathalyzer for marijuana, and so in order to confirm marijuana use, officers must take drivers to police stations to administer a blood test.
But even if after all that, officers are able to get that test and prove a driver had marijuana in his or her system, there's a debate over what level really means the driver was actually under the drug's influence.To combat marijuana-impaired driving, some states have established a clear legal standard for judging whether someone is driving under the influence: 5 milligrams of THC (the primary intoxicant in marijuana) per milliliter of blood.But new research shows that even substantially impaired marijuana users would not be caught under this standard if they consumed pot in edible form.Unlike alcohol, which is nearly exclusively consumed in beverage form, marijuana can be consumed via a variety of methods. While it's primarily smoked, as the legalization and commercialization of marijuana has spread, cannabis-infused sodas, tinctures, cookies, and candies have become increasingly popular.That poses a challenge for regulators: Because edible cannabis is absorbed through the stomach rather than the lungs, most researchers suspect that edible and smoked marijuana affect the body differently. One such researcher, Johns Hopkins University professor Ryan Vandrey, recently studied whether consuming marijuana edibles raises blood levels of THC sufficiently for a stoned driver to be defined as legally impaired.Participants in Vandrey’s study consumed marijuana brownies of varying strength that matched the levels of THC commonly available in the recreational and medical markets. The study continuously monitored participants’ blood for the presence of THC over several days. Although the marijuana brownies caused significant decrements in participants’ attentiveness, physical coordination and ability to concentrate, only 11 percent of them ever had a THC blood level over the legal limit. In other words, although the participants would have been very high-risk drivers, current law defined 89 percent of them as nonimpaired.“Our findings tell me that 5 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood is just not a good marker for intoxication,” Vandrey says. Attorney and highway safety expert Stephen Talpins agrees, arguing that the current standard is “a license to use with near impunity. There should be zero tolerance for people driving with any amount of THC in their blood.”A zero tolerance standard would solve most of the problems of marijuana edible-impaired drivers going undetected, although a few of Vandrey’s study participants never showed any detectable level of THC in their blood. But a zero-tolerance standard might unfairly convict heavy pot users of impaired driving, because small amounts of THC can linger in their blood for days or even weeks after their most recent toke.Detecting and deterring marijuana-impaired driving thus remains a significant headache for policymakers and law enforcement. More research like Vandrey’s is clearly needed to guide the development of policy that is both firm and fair, but there’s no guarantee lawmakers will wait for scientific results on the topic — especially amid evidence that the rates of marijuana-impaired driving are on the rise. Keith Humphreys is a Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and is an affiliated faculty member at Stanford Law School and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute.Source: Washington Post (DC)Author:  Keith HumphreysPublished: May 31, 2017Copyright: 2017 Washington Post CompanyContact: letters washpost.com Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ URL: http://drugsense.org/url/9xnwSq2MCannabisNews  -- Cannabis Archiveshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/list/cannabis.shtml 
Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help 
     
     
     
     




Comment #6 posted by The GCW on June 01, 2017 at 16:40:23 PT
FoM,
That's interesting. First BIG booze fights cannabis then when cannabis wins they want in.Crazy except today nothing is not crazy. Crazy is the new normal.
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #5 posted by FoM on June 01, 2017 at 11:52:35 PT
License Dispute Could Delay Nev. Recreational Pot
License Dispute Could Delay Nevada Recreational Pot SalesBy - Associated Press - Thursday, June 1, 2017RENO, Nev. (AP) - The July start of Nevada’s recreational marijuana sales could be delayed after a group of alcohol distributors filed a legal challenge to a licensing deadline, arguing they have the first rights to distribute recreational pot.A judge in Carson City on Tuesday evening sided with the alcohol distributors and barred Nevada’s Department of Taxation from enforcing a May 31 deadline to apply for marijuana distribution licenses.The ballot initiative legalizing pot in Nevada gave liquor distributors first dibs on licenses to act as middle-men between marijuana growers, producers and retailers.Nevada officials said there wasn’t enough interest from alcohol wholesalers so medical marijuana license holders were allowed to apply.A lawyer for the liquor distributors told Reno Gazette-Journal -- http://on.rgj.com/2rJxeKa -- that dozens of distributors were interested but state officials withdrew applications amid worries about conflicts with federal law.This story has been to cite a liquor lawyer’s interview with the Reno Gazette-Journal.Information from: Reno Gazette-Journal, http://www.rgj.com
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #4 posted by afterburner on June 01, 2017 at 00:54:11 PT
Zero Tolerance Is Intolerance, That Is Prohibition
The engineering standards of machine tolerance show a small range of acceptable variance from the stated standard. Examples: "An electrical specification might call for a resistor with a nominal value of 100 Ω (ohms), but will also state a tolerance such as '±1%'. This means that any resistor with a value in the range 99 Ω to 101 Ω is acceptable. For critical components, one might specify that the actual resistance must remain within tolerance within a specified temperature range, over a specified lifetime, and so on."
-Engineering tolerance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_tolerance"An example of the concept of tolerance is a shaft for a machine is intended to be precisely 10 mm in diameter: 10 mm is the nominal dimension. The engineer designing the machine knows that in reality, the grinding operation that produces the final diameter may introduce a certain small-but-unavoidable amount of random error. Therefore, the engineer specifies a tolerance of ±0.01 mm ('plus-or-minus' 0.01 mm)."As long as the grinding machine operator can produce a shaft with actual diameter somewhere between 9.99 mm and 10.01 mm, the shaft is acceptable." 
-Allowance (engineering)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allowance_(engineering)#Confounding_of_the_engineering_concepts_of_allowance_and_toleranceMilitary component tolerance is even more restrictive than standard commercial component tolerance, that is, it allows even less variance. However, even military component tolerance is not zero tolerance. Why do governments apply to frail humans the impossible standard of zero tolerance, that even machines and electronics cannot meet?The law and its authors, enforcers and judges are in love with prohibition and its stolen benefits. For example, the voters of the State of Michigan passed a citizens' initiative recommending that only active THC be grounds for a charge of impairment. The Michigan Supreme Court overruled the scientifically-based will of the voters and allowed prosecutors to use inert THC metabolites as grounds for a charge of impairment. Either the judges are scientifically illiterate or they have a thinly veiled hidden agenda to maintain cannabis prohibition. The result is that any legal medical cannabis patient driving in Michigan is "legally" impaired by court fiat. A petition drive is now underway in Michigan to bring a legalization initiative to the next ballot.First, we take Lansing. Then, we take Washington. 
-apologies to Leonard Cohen.
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #3 posted by Sam Adams on May 31, 2017 at 20:58:33 PT
Everybody agrees...
obviously they didn't talk to me!
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #2 posted by The GCW on May 31, 2017 at 15:10:35 PT
White line test.
If You can walk the white line...Don't punish innocent people and everything's good.If someone is so stoned they can not honestly safely drive, then...Honestly is the key word. -0-"""There should be zero tolerance for people driving with any amount of THC in their blood.”NOPE! That requires government caging responsible adults who choose to use a SAFER substance! -There's no way around that fact.Colorado, legalized cannabis similar to alcohol. Make any amount of alcohol in the human body, zero tolerance, driving wise!!! See where that gets ya.
[ Post Comment ]


Comment #1 posted by rchandar on May 31, 2017 at 12:58:15 PT:
Pure Fiction
I dispute what he's saying. Many smokers are good drivers, and their intoxication is far less than alcohol.If you intend to enforce DUID,you should have public places where smokers can smoke.
[ Post Comment ]


Post Comment