Hey, if I run for office on a family values platform and then my son gets busted, I’m fair game. May not be fair in the big picture, but if I co-opt my family as a paragon of moral virtue, I get to pay the consequences when it turns out that they’re not the saints I made them out to be.
Same with Bush, same with Gore. The purpose of this thread was to skewer St. Al in the face of all the true believers, those who would shred Bush for stuff like this now get to eat some crow. I never said that they couldn’t do it to Bush, I just thought it was petty, and so now the pettiness is returned with a giant helping of irony on top.
We’re talking about politicians. Naturally some form of substance abuse is gonna pop up. Especially when the Whitehouse is involved.
and todays weed ain’t no stronger than it was then, according to 2001’s link. You might’ve had to look a little harder. A friend of mine spent a summer in Hawaii. We’d been smoking the local homegrown, red haired sensamilla. It wasn’t bad dope I might add, several generations old… hmm… I digress
Anyway, he came back with some shit he got there. Little bitty fucking bag, $100 bucks :eek:
We thought he’d lost his mind. We were right. We skipped out and went to the lake, rolled up a pin joint and the four of us got fucking wasted. A couple of hours later, somebody (not me) got straight enough to drive back to school. Bad ass shit that’ll fuck up four regular smokers on one small doobie.
But for the record, let it record that I didn’t inhale.
I know where you’re coming from. I took 2 tokes off a joint in Cambodia, A US ex-soldier who couldn’t hack it back in the States so went back to SE Asia whom I’d been drinking with for a while made it. Slaughtered me and him. We didn’t even finish it. Having “the fear” in Phnom Penh is not a fun thing, trust me.
I always felt like a better driver while high back when I smoked. The biggest cause of accidents for me is ‘zoning out’ and not paying attention to what I am doing, and getting caught by something that is not a normal element of my routine. When sober, driving is a boring task that you let your autopilot take care of, while you daydream or sing along with the radio. When I was high, driving was a richer and far more interesting experience. You feel like you have a better sense of the road, air currents, etc. You notice all the details of the road and automatically extrapolate for what might happen. When you are used to it, being stoned will always make you drive better, simply because it makes you pay more attention to your driving.
Now, if you are stoned and distracted, you can fuck up, but you can be distracted sober too.
Well, blood tests aren’t the only form of marijuana testing, and some might argue that they are not the prefered method. But seeing as blood tests DO pick up THC levels, I seriously have to wonder about “thousands of blood samples” that somehow showed the drivers were not under the influence. What were they measuring, then? You sure as hell can prove a person has been smoking weed from a blood test. Leaving aside the question whether or not it’s dangerous, stating that thousands of blood samples of certain and recent marijuana users didn’t indicate that they were impaired only makes me think the method is fucked up, because you CAN use a blood test to prove someone’s been smoking.
So it’s ok to drift because you’ve been smoking? Or it’s ok that they know their high so they can compensate? What the fuck does that mean? Slowing down can also have it’s own problems. Someone driving slower then the rest of traffic is just as bad as someone speeding through traffic.
Just because someone who’s been smoking isn’t directly involved in an accident doesn’t mean they don’t cause others. A simple drifting for you, the pot smoker, may put me, the motorcyclist off the road trying to avoid you. So for those of you who think that even a tiny little loss of concentration while your on the road is ok, fuck you, it might be funny to you to drift a bit but it can kill me.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot Coldie. I might be over in Europe in June for about a month. I’ll be borrowing a motorcycle so you’ll have to show me some good roads while I’m there. I know I’ll be coming your way as I want to see Golden Earring and they only play in the Neatherlands any more.
Yeah, I guess a Golden Earring world tour is right out at this stage.
Sure, let me know when and where. There’s tons of good riding to be had in the Netherlands, although you have to expect no more elevations than a speed bump or two. I’ll gladly team up with you for a day or two to show you around. What kind of bike, so I know whether to start training my curves?
The other tests you linked to only show past use, and are useless for determining a driver’s impairment. If you haven’t smoked for months, you can smoke a whole joint and pass a urine test 5 minutes later; OTOH, if you last smoked a week ago, you could fail a urine test today.
No.
“Prepared by the SA Office of Road Safety, it shows more than 20 per cent of injured drivers have cannabis, stimulants or tranquillisers in their blood - compared to 8.5 per cent with alcohol. … 12.6 per cent of men had cannabis in their blood compared with 6.3 per cent of women”
Averaging the latter two percentages, we can suppose that 9.45% of injured drivers have cannabis in their system… slightly more than have alcohol. But we don’t know 1) how many of the drivers with cannabis in their system also had alcohol; 2) how many noninjured drivers also have cannabis in their system; or 3) whether the test meant that the driver was high at the time of his accident, or only that he had smoked pot sometime in the past month.
Got it. Zero tolerance for loss of concentration. I assume your car doesn’t have a radio or a cup holder, and your passengers aren’t allowed to speak to you, right?
We DO know that the driver had elevated THC levels, since all tests were blood tests, as per EtH’s link. But hey, if you want to deduce it all to non-interacting factors, you would probably come to the conclusion that that 20% of injured drivers with mary jay traces in their blood got into an accident for a reason other than their pot use. This debate is getting us nowhere, in other words.
Also, the point about neutron star’s research still stands. Thousands of blood tests, no signs of “danger” as n.s. put it. What were they testing? The Australian link demonstrates that elevated THC levels stemming from marijuana use can indeed be observed from a blood sample. How in the hell do “thousands of blood samples”, taken in the US, from admitted recent MJ users, show no signs of danger, or whatever vague phrasing is used?
It makes no sense.
You’re seriously equating completely automated behaviours such as listening to smoking a halucinatory substance?
Wow. I’ll scratch Mr. 2001 off the list of serious participants, here.
I’m not familiar with the limits of blood tests. I’ll take your word that they reflect actual “highness” at the time, and not merely the lingering metabolites.
Like I said, that figure means nothing without knowing how many of those cannabis smokers were also on other drugs. I’ve read (no cite) that most injured drivers who test positive for marijuana are also drunk.
It would also help to know what percentage of all drivers have cannabis in their blood.
Pressing buttons on the radio and lifting a cup to one’s mouth are not completely automated. Concentrating on a song or talk show, or talking on the phone or to a passenger, is also more distracting that simply listening to background noise, even when no hands are involved - you only have so much attention to go around, so when you focus on the radio, you pay less attention to the road.
Good, that impostor can go to hell. Leave Mr2001 on there, though.
You talk about distractions like playing with the radio and drinking a soda, Mr2001, but what you’re leaving out is the fact that a pothead does the same stuff, with the additional dstraction of being high as a kite.
I personally don’t blame the kid for being a stoner. I would, too, if I had been saddled with some nerdy name like “Albert Arnold Gore III.” All he needs is some glasses with some tape on the bridge to make the picture complete.
DtC, you know that not everyone responds to THC the same way. When I smoked I couldn’t drive. And if I enjoyed Miss Toklas’s brownies, I hallucinated. I might have been an anomaly, and so would anyone that I could have injured or killed. So I stayed put or someone else drove.
I’ve seen too many decent parents with wild kids to fault the parents every time. But keep in mind that GWB praised the Osborne family’s values in comparison to Murphy Brown’s. That was a stretch.
Maybe GWB shouldn’t be quite so judgmental about what constitutes a family. That is what pisses me off about his family values – not what his daughters did.
As for the Gores, I like Tipper better anyway.
Where did the arrest of young Gore take place, BTW?
Oh, yeah. I missed this post. So glad I saw it now.
How ironic, the wife of the candidate that everyone here seems to have wanted made a herculean effort to abridge speech in the 1980s in response to suicides alleged to have been caused by music lyrics. And people here have the unmitigated gall to say that Bush (through Ashcroft) is trying to stifle free expression? Bwahaha!
I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the PMRC, a fine organization of Americans that couldn’t even stand up to Dee Snider, so pathetic was their stance. Still, one good thing came from that. Due to Tipper’s efforts, the “Explicit Lyrics” sticker was placed on the albums, thus pointing the children to the good stuff rather than having them waste their time and money on cheesy non-controversial stuff. Well done, Tipper.
And now that I’m done insulting her, I guess I have to give her some props for trying to uphold some family values, as it were, just in a very piss-poor and questionably legal fashion. Too bad she was too worried about everyone else’s kids and (quite obviously) not too concerned about her own.
It was just one example, though, of data that’s missing from the discussion. Along with the data on accidents caused by people under the influence who didn’t know they’d caused an accident (drifting towards another car, for example, which drives off the road), and people who were in accidents that were never reported because it involved a telephone pole and didn’t damage the car enough to make it undrivable, or because all parties involved wanted to keep off the insurance companies’ radar.
And I think that that assumption is at least part of what’s being discussed here. If it’s not, it should be.
Fine by me. A license is a responsibility, not an entitlement. I was extremely surprised when I found out that all I needed to do to renew my license the first time was to tell the DMV I still lived at the same address and pony up the renewal fee. If I remember correctly, they didn’t even ask me if I’d gone blind in the previous five years. It’s already a pretty screwed-up system, and reminding me of another reason why driving is dangerous in general doesn’t do much to convince me that driving stoned is safe. It may be safer than driving while elderly, but that doesn’t make it a good idea.
How many of the good players are stoned? If the percentage is very large, perhaps basketball would be even faster-paced if the players weren’t all wasted.
When did I say anything about sample size? I was saying that it’s probable that the majority of situations which involve “danger” on the road are not included if you only look at statistics about fatal crashes and accidents in which the at-fault driver was under the influence.
I’m not sure how else to re-word it. The cites which had been put up by the time I’d posted, it seemed to me, involved either fatalities or at-fault drug use. Since a stoned driver who simply couldn’t put on the brakes fast enough to avoid a sober red-light runner, yet lived to get high again, would be neither dead nor at fault, they would not be included in such statistics, and so there was data missing. The Australian study appears to do something to include such people, but it just makes me want to know what percentage of accidents are reported (out of the total number of accidents), and for what percentage of them was the proper testing for THC done (and in what timeframe).
I don’t, as should be obvious, share your optimism, but I also don’t remember calling pot a “menace,” either.
What seems clear to me is that there are plenty of unaccounted-for situations where driving stoned may lead to a higher risk of danger to life or property than driving sober. Until those gaps in knowledge are filled in (somehow), erring on the side of caution by not driving while wasted should be the behaviour to choose, if a person gives a hoot about the other people on and off the road.
And my anecdotal observations do nothing but tell me that driving while high is very dangerous, indeed, as I’ve seen a number of stoned people who couldn’t even walk straight. But, such stories are, indeed, anecdotal, which is why I try not to base my judgement of what should be empirical matters upon them.
wring wrote:
Obviously, if only “real world” data is acceptable, you are correct. This naturally leads into the question of how much real-world statistics on drunk driving differ from the statistics generated by drunk people in driving simulators. Is the data so far off that we can’t get a few thousand people stoned, run them through the same sorts of tests, and have the results reflect, to some degree of accuracy, what happens on real roads? If nobody has tested drunks in “almost accident” situations with simulators, I would be amazed. It seems like an obvious use for them.
