issue that has emerged with the spread of pot legalization: how to define—and prevent—stoned driving. Between 2009 and 2011, the number of THC-positive blood samples obtained from drivers by Colorado police more than doubled. A study found that about 7 percent of California drivers surveyed on two weekend nights last summer tested positive for THC. Nearly the same percentage had alcohol in their blood; 1 percent had both pot and booze. (Drivers who agreed to participate in the study were given legal immunity, handed $20, and hooked up with a ride home if necessary.) But just how stoned is too stoned to drive?
Figuring that out isn't easy. In all 50 states, if you're pulled over on suspicion of driving under the influence, you must submit to a Breathalyzer test or face arrest and possibly a blood test. Yet cops lack anything like a Breathalyzer for THC, and studies have shown that the field sobriety test widely used by police departments correctly fingers stoned drivers only about 30 to 50 percent of the time; drunks are detected 80 percent of the time. Some police departments are trying to improve those odds: The Colorado State Patrol employs specialized drug recognition expertsarmed with a 12-step protocol that includes one-leg stands, finger-to-nose tests, and checking for "a lack of ocular convergence." Although Colorado does not have a legal limit on blood THC levels, it wins convictions on 90 percent of its drugged-driving cases.
i can understand the potential unfairness of the provision everyone has different tolerance levels what blotto's one is just a groove thing for many others, this is one of those handed to state things that they proved that some states are not ready for.
But these approaches don't account for what scientists know about marijuana's effects on drivers. "The reality is that alcohol and cannabis are two very different drugs that affect people in very different ways," says Jan Ramaekers, a psychology and neuroscience professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. A 2009 study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that THC can persist in chronic pot smokers' blood for a week after they stop smoking, sometimes at levels in excess of 3 ng/ml. Other research shows that those residual blood levels (and sometimes even much higher levels) don't impair most heavy users' psychomotor skills. If the goal is to arrest only people who are driving dangerously, Ramaekers says, then laws like Washington's could lead to a rash of false convictions.While booze can make people drive faster and more aggressively, marijuana has the opposite effect: Pot smokers, studies show, tend tocompensate for their impairment by slowing down and leaving larger gaps between themselves and other cars. Still, Ramaekers cautions against thinking that stoners acting like Sunday drivers are safer. Marijuana users may "try to create their own box of safety, and within that world they can operate fine," he says. "But there's a lot of other information outside of that box that they can't process, and that is a problem."
hope these decisions aren't made by those who still believe gov't attempt to scare you straight with such potential oscar nominee's as "REEFER MADNESS" as much as we did in the 60's and on never ever saw anyone exhibit any of those proposed symptoms, mostly side effects; ROFLYAO, munchies never had an accident while indulging not a endorsement i can only speak for myself.
