I don’t have stats in front of me, but I have to imagine there are a lot more weed and alcohol users than there are xanax, morphine, etc., users.
Well, the enormously successful campaign against alcohol use and driving used threat as a major component–threat of getting killed, threat of killing others, threat of lifelong consequences from prosecution, etc.
Whether or not there’s a problem testing for impairment, what I’m immediately concerned about is making people terrified that they will get caught driving around while smoking. If your car is filled with a cloud of smoke and drivers in other cars can smell the stank, I don’t think you need some kind of additional precise testing method.
No stats here, either, but we aren’t talking about users, we’re talking about people who use while operating a motor vehicle, right?
I’ll match your anecdotal observation with one of my own. I know people who have been involved in car accidents while driving under the influence of alcohol, cocaine, xanax, and lack of sleep. Nobody I know has been involved in a car accident while under the effects of cannabis.
Maybe I’m still not understanding. I was saying that your phrasing (in the above quotes) seemed odd. My point was that most people aren’t going to have a problem with DUI type laws that would apply to marijuana.
You do though. As someone that never drank on college, I was always the DD. I drove a lot of really drunk friends home meaning if I got pulled over, my car would have absolutely reeked of alcohol (or puke). If I risking jail time to drive my friends home because the car smelling like alcohol implied I was driving drunk…I wouldn’t be driving them around anymore.
It’s the same here, just the smell of marijuana in a car (or even the presence of smoke) shouldn’t be enough to convict a driver of a DUI. Maybe, at most, some lesser charge, but even then, the smell alone shouldn’t be enough.
I know many people will disagree with me on this, but you’d be surprised at how often you smell marijuana and it’s just a skunk.
Plus, you will absolutely have police abusing that. The amount of people pulled over or getting their cars searched because ‘I smelled marijuana emanating from the vehicle will driving behind them’ is going to skyrocket. Especially since it’s essentially impossible to prove the officer didn’t smell marijuana.
How about just use of marijuana in a moving vehicle? The smoke and the reek is probable cause to search for more evidence of use.
And I don’t believe that your car is going to be visibly filled with marijuana smoke and people one other cars are going to smell the stank unless you have lit joints in that car.
Around here, and on the streets I’m talking about, it ain’t skunks. Especially if the smell persists as you keep moving in traffic and your are right next to that smoky car.
If that’s a problem, then I guess the question is whether you are trying to cite them for impairment that causes unsafe driving.
Of course, you might see someone’s car full of vape smoke, smell nothing, and have no way to tell if that’s a nicotine vape pen or a marijuana one. I don’t think police pulling over a bunch of (let’s be honest, minority) drivers because of clouds of smoke is a great idea. White drivers might slide by with cars full of marijuana clouds while black drivers are pulled over and harassed for tobacco.
Well yeah that is a problem with that component. I’m not going to say I know how to solve that problem. but more pulling over of individual cars isn’t necessarily the sole option. The fight against drunk driving was a whole social movement with more components than just pulling over more individual cars—which would have been subject to the same race problem too.
Which honestly should be the standard anyway. If person A and person B drank the same amount but A is tipsy with reduced dexterity and B is fine, B really doesn’t need to be prosecuted.
Unless they’ve got an open container in the car
Humans; from one extreme to another; they’ll never change. First, we have “Reefer Madness”. Now, we have the opposite. Marijuana is perfect. It isn’t. It’s a mind altering substance. It can affect driving just like alcohol or prescription drugs can. One needs to exercise good judgment in its use.
The difference is that we have an objective metric for alcohol (.08 BAC) that doesn’t exist for marijuana. For example, take this scenario: Once the cops pull over someone from a minority group and run a test that shows he had smoked within the last month, they search his car, and find both a tobacco vape pen as well as a marijuana one. He claims he was smoking the tobacco pen - but the cop claims to have smelled the odor of marijuana. How do we prove what really happened one way or the other?
As for the larger social fight against Drunk Driving - I don’t think there’s some huge contingency of people who think stoned driving is just fine but recognize the issues with drunk driving. There’s probably a lot of overlap between people who would drive while impaired with alcohol or marijuana. And it’s not like we don’t still have drunk drivers - I’ve seen a guy going down the freeway while drinking vodka out a glass handle. He didn’t even bother to put it in a brown paper bag - he was holding it out the window, at one point.
I agree that impaired driving is an issue, I just don’t think there’s as big a difference in the cultural attitudes for driving drunk and driving high as you imply. I think the vast majority of people agree that both are bad.
I’m going to say that the cop should be required to observe you driving in a manner that suggests you’re under the influence of something. Unlike smells, even if the cop is wrong, their dash and body cams can help prove the had cause to pull the driver over.
Like I said, I know people will disagree with me. I don’t know where ‘around here’ is, but around here, a skunk that’s sprayed off in a distance can be smelled, quite noticeably, for a mile or so.
And how do you know it’s THAT car and not the one two in front of it?
The other issue, as Babale mentioned is that pulling someone over based solely on seeing the car filled with smoke, gives the cops the ability to pull over a lot of people just because they want to hassle them. Back when I was in college, the county changed a policy and cops were allowed to pull over anyone they saw smoking a cigarette in their car if they felt they were a minor. At least from our POV, that seemed to be designed to allow them to pull over college kids they thought were smoking weed in their car.
My point being some laws are put into place knowing they’re going to be used for purposes other than how they’re written. For example there’s no reason a cop seeing a burned out license plate light, upon verifying the plate matches the car, can’t just send a letter to the address requesting it be fixed. There’s no reason for that to turn into a full blown traffic stop.
What’s your point. “Unless they’ve got an open container in the car” changes the dynamics of everything. There’s no reason to give someone a ticket for going 41 in a 40, unless they’ve got an open container.
But what if the cops were allowed to pull over anyone at all that they observed to be drinking anything, on the assumption that it’s not water/soda/coffee, but alcohol in an open container. You’re on your way to work, take a sip of coffee and find yourself doing sobriety tests on the side of the road and ya know, sir, I smell the faint odor of marijuana, do you mind if I search your car?
Both are bad, sure. But, IMHO, drunk driving is much worse.
In the same way that being falling over drunk is worse than being slightly buzzed, but both are bad and you shouldn’t drive in either case, I agree.
Of course, if you’re “monster high” to the point of being non-functional, that’s worse than if you took a toke a few hours ago.
To clarify - the more impaired you are, the worse it is to be driving. Alcohol generally impairs you more than weed, so is worse. But with sufficient quantities of pot, you can reach the same level of impairment.
Fascinating article that I always think of when this topic comes up. Draw your own conclusions:
I had a subscription at the time. I can’t believe it’s >40yrs ago …
I have a copy of a study that was published by the USDOT. While both pot and alcohol can impair your driving, this study found that no amount of marijuana made you as dangerous as being really drunk. Being drunk makes most people feel invincible and promotes risky behavior. Pot does the opposite. (but it certainly slows your reflexes and reaction time). You generally don’t get stoned people driving 110 mph into a tree, but drunk people do it all the time.
Right, but the driver going 20 mph on the freeway as he’s tripping out is also a danger 
though admittedly not as much of one.
My experience with MJ-smoking drivers is here in Miami on our local speedway: Interstate 95. Some carloads of folks spewing MJ stench drive more or less normally albeit absent-mindedly. Others are weaving in and out of traffic doing 20 to 30 mph more than the rest of us are. And we’re generally going 85 to 90.
There may in fact be mellow or slow-driving MJ-infused drivers. But I haven’t noticed any here. Maybe those are the cars that don’t stink quite so much.
Psychologically, even things that are totally obvious common sense need to be repeated. So, for sure, messages/campaigns stating not to take drugs and drive remain, and have always been, appropriate.
Nor is there any reason to be lenient, assuming someone thinks it is OK to smoke up and drive. I think it is a dangerous slope to tell people that smoking up to some analytically testable precise level might be legal.