twitch
That may be the case. But it’s lousy logic. (Or maybe you have a government more worthy of trust, I don’t know.) If I claimed that herbs heal with as little evidence and as great a certainty that people claim pot impairs, I’d be beaten down and the FDA would slap my ass with a huge fine.
it is crappy logic, that’s true, but I can’t for the life of me fathom why the Dutch government, which condones pot smoking, would prohibit it in when driving, other than that there’s evidence that it impairs people ability to do so. Re the little evidence and great certainty: have you ever tried any pot? How much evidence do you need?
For what little it’s worth, I drove once or twice high on weed and couldn’t keep my mind on what I was doing. Scared me shitless. Of course, people are different, and I suppose someone who does pot regularly could be a bit more focussed than I was. But I really don’t want anyone who’s doing pot on the road with me. I’m in enough danger with all the drunks, cell phone users, and full-time morons.
I hear what y’all are saying, but, again, one must have standards of evidence. When the clinical trials are mixed, personal experience doesn’t tell us anything (except that you, personally, shouldn’t drive stoned.)
On this board when I was a newbie poster, I didn’t get away with asserting that Belladona homeopathic works for reducing fevers because there’s no clinical trials saying it does, despite the fact that it works for me and my husband and kids. Under the same logic, you don’t get away with asserting that marijuana impairs driving because it impairs *your *driving. There could be any number of reasons you’re impaired when high, including that you *expect *to be impaired when high. The scientific jury is still quite out on the subject.
I don’t have a driver’s license as of yet - although this is going to change shortly, I hope - but I think that even when the clinical trials are mixed, which I’m sure they are, when legislating on matters like these we should be on the safe side and forbid it. To provide an analogy, it’s allowed here to drive after having drunk up to two alcoholic beverages. Obviously, many people can still drive capably even after two drinks, but I still think it’s a bad rule because 1) it tends to get people on a slippery slope that they wouldn’t get on to if the rule was more absolute (no alcohol when driving) and 2) it can happen in individual cases that people are not able to drive even after drinking one glass of wine, for instance when they caught little sleep or didn’t eat or whatever. The same goes for pot, I’m sure you’ll agree, so that’s why I’d argue to be safe rather than sorry and forbid driving when stoned (or hepped up on goofballs).
I’m pro-pot to a degree, but pot+driving=bad.
In my experience, alcohol makes you temporarily dumber (and sadly, more confident). Pot kinda makes you dumber in one direction, and smarter in another. It’s kinda like your brain is being squeezed out of a square shape into a rectangular one. Great if the activity you’re doing is along the brain’s “horizontal axis”, but not so hot otherwise - and it can change without warning. This is why you can smoke pot and be “cleverer” at, say, listening to music in that you get more out of the music, but an onlooker would see you as a slumped, stoned idiot. I’ve done things like fine motor activities while stoned, and have done them much better than I would if I weren’t stoned - and then suddenly, and without warning, I forget what it was I was supposed to have been doing in the first place. Try touch typing stoned. You can get lost in a landscape of letters, and really get in the zone, making perfect, err0r-free and high speed documents. But the next moment your fingers turn into bunches of bananas. Pot is like that. I don’t like being driven by a stoned person.
The difference is that there’s *lots *of unequivocal evidence that alcohol impairs driving, even at fairly low doses.
I’m sure you can easily find the studies which suggest that marijuana makes for unsafe drivers, so I won’t bother linking to that. I will offer a link to NORML’s summation of studies which find no such link, or a level of impairment comparable to prescription medications (far less than alcohol), or impairment in driving simulators but not real world driving: http://norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=5450
To say “better safe than sorry” is to blindly accept the scare tactics and not the science. I might as well link to the Australian study which found cannabis users safer drivers while stoned and suggest that smoking a joint be *required *before getting behind the wheel. It would be equally ridiculous.
I don’t really see who’s scaring whom here. Me, I’m not buying into anything, I’m just saying that when you’re drawing up rules for this kind of stuff, the evidence you need to forbid something need not be unequivocal, nor does it need to apply to each and every individual. Even if it could be shown that pot does nothing to the driving abilities of 75 per cent of the drivers, I’d still say that it should be outlawed.
What if it did nothing to the driving abilities of 95% of drivers? Would you feel the same?
You’re either accepting that, of course, pot impairs driving with no evidence OR you’re accepting the selective quoting by the media and government of only those studies which show impairment. The first would be ignorance. The second would be believing scaremongering.
Me too! But it hasn’t been shown. Not yet. For me, studies would need to show significant impairment in, say, 50%* of drivers to outlaw it (“significant impairment” being defined as “as likely to cause an accident as someone with a 0.81 BAC,” since that defines impairment for alcohol.) But they don’t. Yet.
*Number derived rectally.
Personally I think pot should be legal.
That being said, there are considerations for consumption that don’t apply to tobacco or alcohol.
I can go to a party where everyone but me is drinking and smoking cigs and walk out 6 hours later stinking, but completely sober. Designated driver for my roommates and no real concerns about being pulled over.
Go to the same party where everyone is toking up and 6 hours later I’ve got the munchies along with everyone else. It’s called a contact high for a reason. The designated driver had to be somewhere else completely removed from that party.