If this turns into a debate, by all means move it to another forum, but at this point I’m really just after a simple (if possible) answer.
Suppose marijuana is legal where I am and I’m walking to my car past a large group of people smoking. Is it possible this will affect my ability to drive? If so, how much second hand smoke do I need to inhale?
Google search only brings me results about passing drug tests, which is great from a selfish angle but not so much from an egalitarian one.
Don’t have any science on this, but “walking past” a group of people smoking can only result in a very transient exposure, and presumably a correspondingly small effect in terms of impairing your driving ability.
Don’t be too quick to dismiss the information on passing tests. Presumably the exent to which your driving ability is impaired by the effects of marijuana doesn’t depend on how you were exposed to it - directly or at second hand. You either have a sufficient concentration of marijuana in your blood to impair your driving ability to a material degree or you do not. Also presumably, the legal limits on blood/marijuana levels for drivers reflect somebody’s notion of what “a sufficient concentration” to impair drivinb ability would be. Therefore, the question of whether exposure to second-hand smoke could cause you to fail that test is not entirely disconnected from the question of whether it could impair your driving ability.
Unless you’re in a small room/car with someone smoking a lot of high potency weed, then you aren’t going to get a contact high. You need to inhale enough of the THC to feel any effects, and being outside and walking past someone smoking, def isn’t going to get you high or even a contact high. It’s possible you could get high if you stood irght next to them and they blew the smoke in your face I guess.
walking by ? I don’t think you’d inhale much but if ya stood there for 10 minutes or so …….and it depends on the quality of pot … I mean ive walked by some you could barley smell and them some where I was buzzed standing by the apt waiting for the traffic to go by to cross the street ……
this is an interesting question.
If one can absorb measurable amounts of whatever the drug test determines to be marijuana from just being in the area, what does that mean if the person is in an accident? If the subject is suspected of driving under the influence and tests positive, what defense does the subject have? I can hang around people drinking all day and as long as I don’t imbibe, I am good to go. One can’t say that about marijuana.
Yet another legal tangle for the near future.
“Measurable amounts” is not equal to be under the influence. Same as alcohol. I suspect the amount of THC you would have in your system by being around smokers would not even show up on a test, let alone be high enough to establish impairment. When in doubt, take an Uber.
One thing it will mean is that, in an accident, your clothes will stink of weed. That will probably require some explaining and possibly a drug test.
Not that much of a tangle. Typically, the law doesn’t penalise having consumed alcohol or smoked marijuana; it just penalises driving while having a blood/alcohol level, or marijuana/alcohol level, in excess of such-and-such. How you absorbed/imbibed/ingested/inhaled the alcohol or marijuana is irrelevant.
If - which I highly doubt - hanging around stoners could result in you having an excessive blood/marijuana level, then it would be your responsiblity not to hang around stoners before you drive. We might have some sympathy if you got charged simply because you were hanging around your stoner friends, but if it is true that
having that level of marijuana in your blood materially impairs your driving, then you shouldn’t be driving.
I have a buddy who likes to fire one up in his car, I have sat right next to him for an extended period of time and not felt anything. When we were kids sometimes the girls who didn’t smoke would complain of contact highs when we had a car load of pot smokers.
It does in Utah.
Any measurable amount is illegal.
So the amount is set at the lower limit of what is measurable with the available technology. My point stands; what is penalised here is not smoking or ingesting marijuana, but having a measurable level of marijuana in your blood.
I note from the article that their is an affirmative defence (i.e. one the defendant must plead and prove) that the substance was “involuntarily ingested”. This might be available if, e.g. you were fed hash cookies, and didn’t know they were hash cookies. Whether it would be available if you voluntarily spent time in the company of people you knew to be smoking dope is one for the Utahan courts, I think.