My point’s putative lack of reality, actually, is based on the experience of 37 years of not bad driving - two speeding incidents, where neither involved pot. (Indeed, I can be an impatient driver, but never when I’m stoned.)
All those examples you gave are much more demanding than driving a car stoned - definite buzzkill activities, duuuuuude.
Driving a car stoned is like riding a bicycle. For this run-of-the-mill hombre, anyway.
Are they using mesquite or hickory?
I don’t want to discuss driving, since it’s sacrosanct.
Maybe once a month I need to fire up the chainsaw for various jobs around the farm. I have a great degree of respect for the chainsaw, along with a smidgen of fear. Before starting any job I have a few puffs to help quell the little bit of nervousness.
Just an observation.
Many drinkers believe they drive better with one under their belt. Quells nervousness they say. They’re (almost) universally wrong. And I only shoehorn that (almost) in there because there’s very little that can be said to be universally true about humans.
The central flaw in all this anecdata is the device you’re using to measure your performance is the device who’s calibration you’re diddling with your medication of choice.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack. I’m a property-casualty actuary, and I’ve been following the issues around marijuana and driving since states started talking about legalizing medical marijuana, and I’d like to share some of that.
Re marijuana and driving. There are two factors to consider.
(2) doesn’t necessarily follow from (1). Maybe the people who care about the legal status of pot aren’t inclined to toke and drive. Or, maybe, people impaired by pot are aware of that, and compensate by driving more cautiously. As the joke goes, “drivers who are high don’t get into accidents, they cause other people to get into accidents as annoyed drivers swerve around the slow-moving cars.”
The organization that has done the most work in gathering hard data on this topic is the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), and its sister organization, the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI).
Taking (1) first, there’s plenty of data that drivers who are high have slower reflexes and worse coordination. I think Shodan gave a cite above, and that result isn’t considered controversial in the field. Is it possible that there are people who are so uptight that they drive better if they are slightly high? Maybe. But overall, yes, marijuana impairs coordination and reflexes. I don’t want my surgeon to be high, and I wouldn’t handle a chainsaw if I were impaired. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want my surgeon to be short on sleep, or be distracted by needing to pee, either.
The evidence for (2) is much weaker. When Washington and Colorado had legalized recreational pot, I went to a presentation on safety features in cars given by Kim Hazelbaker, of HLDI. After the presentation, I asked him about pot, and he told me with evident frustration that they were comparing the accident rates of Washington state with otherwise-similar Oregon, and hadn’t been able to find any evidence of an increase in accidents. It looks like they have since been able to quantify an increase, but it’s relatively small, +3%
http://www.iihs.org/externaldata/srdata/docs/sr5204.pdf
There was a really excellent presentation from IIHS/HLDI about pot use that I’m having trouble getting a good link to (it wants to just download a PDF). You can find it by going to the IIHS presentation site and searching
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/iihs-website-search
search for “marijuana”
currently, the 5th search result is a presenation titled “Marijuana and driving in the United States: prevalence, risks, and laws”
Because I can’t give a good link, and because IIHS/HLDI is all about getting their material seen as widely as possible, I’m going to paraphrase and quote some chunks here.
Comparing to alcohol: Alcohol in the blood is easy to measure and is a good proxy for impairment. “Relationship between BAC and amount of degradation in driving performance and driving-related skills and functions is well established across population”
In contrast, it’s hard to measure pot. Some tests are based on THC, others on metabolites that persist long after use. Blood tests are better than urine tests, but still imperfect. “Oral fluid [I assume that means spit] increasingly regarded as readily available and unobtrusive alternative for testing drugs”. But “No evidence-based threshold for impairment”.
Real-life studies are all over the place, with some showing pot use could double crash risk, and some showing zero impact.
It cites a 2015 NHTSA study that actually measured drug and alcohol use in control drivers (who didn’t have an accident, but were otherwise similar to a driver who did have an accident) the looked at the impact of alcohol, pot, antidepressants, narcotic anagesics, sedatives, and stimulants.
“Two control drivers randomly selected from traffic stream one week after crash at the same time of day, location, and direction of travel as crash-involved drivers”
this study found an increase in crash risk associated with pot, but after adjusting for demographic variables and alcohol, the effect was effectively zero.
(The impact of alcohol use, BAC > 0.05%, was more than a 400% increase in risk. The impacts, after adjusting for driver demographics and alcohol use, of the other drugs were: antidepressants, -15% (decrease), narcotic anagesics, +18%, sedatives, +19%, stimulants, -8%. and pot, 0%. Remember, these compare to alcohol, +400% or more.)
To quote the conclusion: “Marijuana is increasing in prevalence among drivers, but the strongest study of crash risk to date found no increase in crash risk associated with marijuana use after controlling for relevant covariates”
So, I would suggest that there’s not a good argument to criminalize pot use based on its impact on driving.
Very interesting. Thank you. It always amazes but never surprises that we have an expert on everything.
Is there any info on the substitution effect? IOW, *if * hypothetically in CO a lot of drinking drivers switched to pot as it became legal there might be negligible impact on total accidents. Which would be mis-interpretted as “pot doesn’t increase the accident rate” when the correct interpretation is “Pot has the same accident rate as does alcohol; many crashing folks just switched from one to the other.”
Although if you start from the perspective that some fixed percentage of your population will always be “medicated” with something, then at least that data would support the contention that pot’s no worse than alcohol as to car accidents. And may well be better on other public health measures.
Sorta like vaping versus smoking. “Harm reduction” is fine as long as it’s a one-way process of people switching from smoking to vaping or from vaping to nothing. But if in addition it encourages even more people to go the other way, from nothing to vaping, we’ve merely distributed a potentially similar total harm across a larger population. Which is not obviously progress.
That pretty much says it all.
Not only that , there’s no way to even measure the dosage. Is it currently 1.0 ng/mL or 6.0 ng/ml THC. Is it old or new? You’ll never be able to tell because it takes so long to leave your system, up to 30 days, so false positives are unavoidable, and unfair. Then there’s the herb itself. An outdoor weed sativa, think cheap American beer, vs a top shelf medical indica, think 151 proof rum.
There are just way too many variables.
I don’t recommend driving while high. However, there were several studies published by USDOT (and later “withdrawn”) that establish there is increased risk of driving under the influence of marijuana, but it is nowhere as bad as driving while drunk. If I remember correctly, you can’t get worse with pot than a drunk driver at .08 BAC, and often do better.
The “increase” you’re seeing in the statistics is that their testing for marijuana more now after a major crash. The testing usually does not reveal how recent the exposure was and whether or not the driver was even under the influence of marijuana at the time of the collision. Marijuana in the system of a driver does not equal marijuana contributed to the crash. In some cases, sure. In others, probably not.
**Would it bother you if someone was smoking marijuana on the sidewalk?
**
We can’t stop people from being stupid in public. I would just hope that I wasn’t downwind, because pot smells like rotten ass burning.
I have seen some guys so baked they could barely move. I suspect they would be dangerous behind the wheel. I have seen others after just one joint prefectly normal and I suspect they are pretty safe, like .02 or less- a little mellow.
1/2 typo…the word Allow does not belong in there. Kind Nuggets are pungent flavorfully pot that when burnt is quite recognizable.
Sorry for the lack of clarity.
Got it now. Thanks. Should we blame the Kind Nuggets for your typing? Or do you prefer the Purple Panty Dropper that **Morgenstern **favors? 
My current “nuggets” are,
“The Truth”
And, ftr, nudges are never the cause of my typos, I am just a lousy proof-reader.
I couldn’t have said/typed it any better myself. 
That’s** Purple Panty Dropper**.
Some poor farmer labored for about an hour a day to raise those plants, only getting $2250 a pound for the little jewels he manicured and dried so carefully.
Do you know how to tell if a guy is a farmer? Is he 21 and driving a Mercedes AMG? He’s a farmer or a rock star.
Agriculture is big business in CA.
So, check this out. On cannabis forums there will typically be threads where people argue over slang terms. “Kind” and “kine” are a common example. I recognize either. Jamaicans tend to talk about de kine bud, while people in Kansas call it kind bud.
Here’s Urban Dictionary’s take on it.
And then there’s water pipe/hookah/bong/chillum/etc, which are used interchangeably, yet are different things. Being a stoner ain’t all easy!
Some states force the citizens to smoke that shit? Smoking is terrible.
What about;
Intimate Oils, (sometimes called weed lube) for that special experience. Yeah, that’s what it’s for. Not for oral use.
Habit Sparkling Grape Beverage, 100mg. Like a non-alcoholic wine with a THC kick. (Mango, kiwi, strawberry, etc. too)
Gummy bears, cookies, candy bars, train mix, you name it, it’s probably there, and it’s probably loaded with THC or CBD.
Moon bars?
Better than all of that are the concentrates - live resin, rosin, shatter, or cake batter, consumed through either an enail or the quartz banger method.
strong shit
<post doorhinged>
A friend brought back gummy bears from Colorado (I assume). OMG, they were good!
I used to make cannabutter, which was then used to make cookies. But the end product was unpredictable wrt concentration. Some batches you could eat two cookies for a good time, while other batches you’d have to eat a quarter or half cookie.
Oh, and my most-potentially-dangerous foray into making butane honey oil.
Good times, all.
See, and you don’t inhale carbon monoxide, soot or other bad chemicals. How is this not a better way of treating pain than using opioids?
Gummy bear or Vicodin?