The impairments of driving under the influence of alcohol have been extensively studied, but unless I have overlooked the literature it seems that the same investigations have not been carried out with THC.
[0] «Blood THC >2 ng/mL, and possibly even THC >5 ng/mL, does not necessarily represent recent use of cannabis in frequent cannabis users.»; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03768...
Since then, [0] has been published and I think it's worth at least a skim. Since it's quite recent the introduction summarizes some of the most recent research.
The things that jump out at me are:
- [0]: Habitual users with baseline concentrations above legal limits perform just as well as habitual users with baseline concentrations below the legal limit, indicating that for habitual users, the legal limit doesn't have any relation to impairement.
- [1]: A study in Canada analyzed crash reports and blood tests to look at the state of drivers responsible for accidents. While alcohol had a very clear and statistically-significant influence on the risk of a driver causing an accident, THC did not.
To steelman the idea that THC causes accidents, [0] only looks at habitual users with baseline levels of THC and [1] only looks at non-fatal injuries.
My conclusion right now is that the number of drivers in accidents with THC in their blood is going up because the number of people with THC in their blood is going up, not because drivers who use THC cause accidents.
The law's assumption that this level of THC is evidence of impairment seems to be invalid.
The law would be better off measuring impairment in some way and perhaps intensifying penalties when an impairment test fails and the user has THC concentration above some threshold.
[0]: https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/71/12/1225/8299832...
This.
In just the short time since legalization, recreational use in my immediate vicinity (a small Ohio village, one stop light) has decidedly, undeniably increased.
I offer only an anecdotal observation, but my evening walks around town are now accompanied by a dank potpourri of skunk scents, representing I-don't-know-how-many strains of Sativa...
Indica to me that at least 30% of the population here is puffing.
Weed was already easy to get. Any high schooler would have told you it was easier to get than beer BECAUSE it was illegal, nobody had a lucrative license to use for selling it to a minor.
Don't need to hide it anymore, especially if the local police don't have much to do otherwise
>Don't need to hide it anymore, especially if the local police don't have much to do otherwise
Yep. At least in New York City before legalization, using cannabis in public earned you an arrest and a night in jail despite the fact that it wasn't even a misdemeanor, just a local code violation with a $50 fine.
That was done consistently (I know several folks who were caught up in such chicanery) for decades to deter folks from using in public.
But enforcement was spotty and, as usual, melanin content played an outsized role in determining who would be "enforced."
Thank goodness that's not happening anymore.
Edit: Fixed prose ('we' --> 'were')>
I’m sure overall usage numbers are up because I know a lot of people who started using it after they could buy it legally, but those people are all also infrequent users and I’m sure are not driving high. The people who would be deterred by weed being illegal are probably all in the “won’t drive stoned” category. (I’m sure many infrequent users pre-legalization, myself included, were never much worried about the legality but don’t drive high because we like being alive, and we continue to not do so now.)
In addition to the distinctive smell of marijuana, there is often a recreational fire (wood smoke), and/or a BBQ (sizzling meat). It's publicly visible and apparent, but on private property.
I have never been that social, haven't accepted a pass in decades, don't imbibe myself (despite my internym), and don't recommend it to young folk, but I must be getting a microdose and a minor contact high from the gentle breeze that floats through town more often since legalization.
Second hand smoke is real, yo. The wind blows.
To claim the odor is mistakable for sewer gas is borderline funny, unless you’re slyly trying to name a new strain.
This year, I went to British Columbia, and there was this weird scent everywhere that I could not describe. My wife said it was cannabis. I'm still not used to it so I don't know if I'll be able to recognize it next time I travel to North America.
I guess perception of this smell, like many others is genetic.
https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/washington-t...
Thanks for sharing!
It can be a very overpowering smell. When an odor overpowers, it's harder to discern one scent from another.
For me it's was love at first smell. And I didn't smoke. Just smelled it from th adjecent room. It must be genetic.
Alcohol is always dreadful for me. Same goes for cigarettes.
I could see how that might be mistaken as sewage.
I have had dental abscesses in the past that made my mouth taste like I was in a room full of cannabis smoke.
Also, the guy who shot up the church school here and killed and wounded a bunch of kids was a massive pot smoker. It made him psychotic, or magnified that existing mental illness.
1. Impairment from THC, or
2. Worse than average driving and risk management skills in those who use the drug
It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.
Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.
I have to admit, the car safety argument is among the most persuasive, like do you want to get harmed? But in reality the question is not about "harming and nothing more", the question is about growing the egregious power AND caring about the tax payers simultaneously.
But even simpler is just a pacifier. Trivial.
People were rambling on about how they basically live in the Soviet Union.
It could be seat belts, of course, but I don't think that's the obvious conclusion.
If non-weeders have an average seat belt wearing, and if weeders also have an average seat belt wearing, then the proportion of weeders inside of the seat belt non-wearing class is just equal to the proportion of weeders inside the whole population.
The people who don't wear seatbelts are in my observation old folks who grew up without them or before using them was mandatory. It's just their habit.
I've almost never seen a person under about age 40 not using a seatbelt.
I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.
The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.
Restraints play such a pivotal role in crash safety, but not wearing them isn't a meaningful indicator of impairment status.
It is well shown that age (youth) is a major factor in accident rates.
I don't understand how this study can make that claim just looking at crash report data. The assumption that not at fault drivers are representative of people who aren't in accidents at all is pretty generous? It seems likely that folks who are unimpaired are also better at avoiding accidents / driving defensively
From glancing at it, it seems that TCH impair pilots ability. Here is such study (done with flight sims). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1849400/
"The results support our preliminary study and suggest that very complex human/machine performance can be impaired as long as 24h after smoking a moderate social dose of marijuana, and that the user may be unaware of the drug's influence. "
(I have very little doubt that THC is impairing; that pilots can’t legally use it is only very loosely related to that likely linkage.)
> The law's assumption that this level of THC is evidence of impairment seems to be invalid.
I think most will recognize that THC causes impairment. The question that (AFAIK) is unanswered is if it can be measured simply by looking at the concentration of THC in the blood.
In fact, if you look into the mechanisms for alcohol tolerance vs THC tolerance. What you'll find is that alcohol tolerance is a result of the body developing fast paths for breaking down ethanol. Meaning the same BAC will have the same intoxication level, the body just works harder to keep the BAC down.
THC tolerance, on the other hand, appears to be the THC receptors becoming desensitized to THC. Which means the body doesn't appear to metabolize THC faster as tolerance builds.
That's where a blood test might not be a good indicator of THC impairment.
Alcohol tolerance might even be a positive here, since a drinker can drink a glass of beer 24hrs before a flight and be fairly certain that the ethanol has been broken down, regardless of tolerance. If THC metabolize slower as the body builds tolerance, then the impairment may continue for a longer time at a lower intensity even for a small dose, increasing the period of uncertainty.
Driving doesn't require perfect cognition, just good enough. If we went for perfect then anyone over 65 would be banned from operating a car.
And I think that's the hard thing with THC. Yes you may be impaired 24 hours later, but how impaired and how does that compare to age related impairment.
Nearly half of drivers killed in (Ohio County) crashes had THC in their blood - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730 - Oct 2025 (125 comments)
Remember that not all the population drives, nor are accidents randomly distributed in the population.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...
”That generally matches the profile of the stereotypical THC user”
Got a source for that claim?
Every single one of them denied impairment during those periods. Often vehemently so, belittling anyone who suggested they might be impaired as having succumbed to propaganda.
Every single one of them remarked that they were sharper, more alert, and had better memory after stopping.
It’s an interesting phenomenon to watch. I think it’s becoming more socially acceptable to acknowledge that marijuana causes impairment even after the obvious effects have subsided, which was a taboo topic in the years when saying anything negative about marijuana would get you attacked as being pro-prohibition or pro-imprisonment of drug users. I even remember one of the big technical forums in the 2010s had a long debate thread where people were claiming that THC made them better drivers and citing YouTube videos and “studies” to back it up. It would be rare to see anyone try to make that claim in today’s environment.
isn't that just common addiction response?
"no, nothing's wrong with me. my drugs aren't the problem - you are the problem"
But you'll still find some small percentage of them claiming they wouldn't be impaired.
Source: have actually spend a lot of time around addicts.
You have to tune down your self-estimate’s value if your self-estimate shows historical poor performance.
I knew a guy who drove home from bars unquestionably over the legal limit (example: 4-5 drinks in 90 minutes) every single weekend for years without getting caught or getting in accident.
It doesn’t mean he wasn’t impaired.
[0] https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...
Your average driver on weed: drives 5 miles per hour to the taco bell drive thru
Alcohol is so much more impairing. I think just being a daily user isn't the issue. It's the proximity to last use and obviously quantity.
I’ve seen plenty of people who are essentially using THC vapes like nicotine vapes, in that they use them every few hours and start to get anxious if they don’t. Stoned driving has become normalized - between seeing people lighting up behind the wheel on snap map, seeing it on TV (this happened in The Rehearsal season 1), and seeing it in person, it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.
If you’re high all day every day, that may be your normal, but it doesn’t mean you’re competent to drive.
In my personal experience, it took a very long time to fully get through a high dose of THC - usually at least a full night sleep, but sometimes more like two, before my reaction times came back. Notably, it takes much longer for the impairment of THC to wear off than the subjectively enjoyable experience of being high, so you can “sober up” but still be impaired.
If you’ve been getting high every day for 10 years, it is hard to take seriously that you would know if you’re impaired. Kind of like vegans who haven’t tasted dairy for 10 years tend not to be reliable judges of the quality of vegan mayo - how could they possibly know?
I don't trust anyone else on the road because all of you are comically bad drivers compared to someone like me.
Wait, how is mayo, vegan or not, related to dairy?
To be fair, my milkman delivers eggs as well as milk, cream, and butter, but they come from a totally different farm.
I understand that you're taking issue with the idea of always being impaired, but the article indicates that there's a pretty clear association between having ingested THC and being in a car crash.
This is blatantly intellectually dishonest. If 100% of people drink water then it’s not surprising when 100% of people in car crashes have been drinking water.
If less than 40% of the population has impairment levels of THC at any given time but 40% of deceased car crash drivers have impairment levels of THC in their blood, you can’t pretend that THC use is equivalent to drinking water.
The mental gymnastics being done in this thread to try to ignore this study are fascinating.
You're looking at two different populations in this and your other comments, drawing a false equivalence. The study is over a 6 year period, over which 103 people (40%) tested positive for THC. You're saying that because the number of people who self-reported consuming THC in the last year is 20%, that means the result of the study is eye popping and shocking because the number is 40%. But you cannot directly infer elevated risk just because a subgroup has a higher prevalence than the general population without controlling for exposure and confounders. Especially considering what we are talking about is people self-reporting they are criminals.
Moreover, fatal crashes are not randomly distributed across age groups or vehicle types, and younger people, because they are not as experienced, they drive more often, in smaller cars with fewer safety features, are more likely both to smoke THC, and die in crashes even while sober. So there's a strong sampling bias here you're not accounting for.
And this isn't downplaying the results, it's pointing out its limitations of the study and warning you not to read into it what isn't there. You seem to be shocked by the results which should cause you to dig deeper into the study. I would say the most surprising thing here is they found nothing changed before and after legalization.
Yes, IF. That was my point.
"Driving under the influence of cannabis was associated with a significantly increased risk of motor vehicle collisions compared with unimpaired driving (odds ratio 1.92 (95% confidence interval 1.35 to 2.73); P=0.0003); we noted heterogeneity among the individual study effects (I2=81)".
n sample size of 1 does not prove anything.
(To be clear, I don't think every daily user is a burnout.)
I'm no angel but I have gotten more diligent... I'm just reacting to "the degree". The goal has to be zero degrees of impairment when a moment of inattention can kill.
Also, my son was just hit by a driver while he was on a bike and in the bike lane. They claimed not to see him. He's fine thankfully but it's really scary to watch him ride off.
No driving if you haven't been getting proper sleep; no driving if jet lagged. No driving if your attention is impaired by grief, stress, or impatience. Or if your annual physical reveals a risk. Or if you've ever had psychological complaints.
We should absolutely make transportation safer, but it's a continuum of tradeoffs.
Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22, and the second most common cause for ages 23–67.
But yes, what you say is the logical consequence (except I'm not kidding about grief and impatience).
My point really is that if we want our kids not to get horribly injured or killed, we can't just focus on "other people" making bad decisions like driving drunk. We have to acknowledge that we've collectively built a system that requires people to put each other in danger with cars, and we have to think about how to change that. Cars bring a lot of benefits like autonomy and decentralization, how do we keep that but kill fewer people?
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
This is a solved problem: look at the current state-of-the-art road design documents from the Netherlands. Apply. Problem solved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
(Wikipedia links to itf-oecd.org/ where those numbers come From)
And in particular for the Uber situation, if taking a taxi 10 miles causes 15 miles of taxi-driving, that's less safe than driving 10 miles with a small to medium impairment.
I know this is going to get downvoted by people who cant imagine an alternative but it’s possible all the same.
FYI murder requires intent, otherwise it is just manslaughter. Your indoctrination is showing by your turns of phrase.
So yea cars are inherently dangerous.
I’m not sure who you think I’m indoctrinated by but around 3000 people are killed every year in my country by cars.
Meanwhile around 200 people are murdered each year.
I’ll give you one try to guess which one dominates the newspapers and public discourse.
And you tell me something about indoctrination, real funny
There are ways to make it less dangerous, sure. But they're never 100% safe. Which makes them, by definition, inherently dangerous. That's... What those words mean.
Like, really man? If you can't even recognize as dangerous the one activity that famously requires someone specifically trained to save people to be present, then I'm happy to end this conversation right here. It's clearly just a waste of time all around. I just hope there's no one in your life depending on you to judge what's safe and what's not.
And swimming pools are pretty dangerous though? There are around 4,500 drowning deaths per year in the US, so on the order of 10x fewer than due to car accidents, but still quite a lot.
I agree with you that it’s a comically wrong threshold, which is why I offered that series that was progressively more safe but never 100% safe as examples against that line of reasoning.
Let me guess, the painted line on the road did not in fact prevent the vehicle from crossing into the bike lane? What we as a society consider acceptable cycling infrastructure is pathetic.
They can even develop an ability to appear sober to casual observers while being impaired.
Feeling sober is not a reliable indicator of being sober. It’s referred to as delusions of sobriety.
When the average is SO high above the legal limit, and with this constraint that there is an upper bound, it's absolutely relevant.
I'm sure you can pick other counties in the US which have either very high representation of THC users or very low representations. Without knowing how other counties score in terms of driver fatalities and THC, this is not really very useful.
To me it sounds like an effort to paint THC as big and scary. But in my experience living in a few large cities, weed is rare - but lots of people go out, drink, and drive home one or more times per week.
ScienceDaily goes even further by rounding up to 50% and burying the location halfway down the summarization.
"Nearly half of drivers killed in crashes had THC in their blood THC-impaired driving deaths are soaring, and legalization hasn’t slowed the trend. Date: October 5, 2025 Source: American College of Surgeons Summary: Over 40% of fatal crash victims had THC levels far above legal limits, showing cannabis use before driving remains widespread. The rate didn’t drop after legalization, suggesting policy changes haven’t altered risky habits. Experts warn that the lack of public awareness around marijuana’s dangers behind the wheel is putting lives at risk."
Unless they publish who funded the study, I'm skeptical that the alcohol industry might be involved. It's absolutely in their best interest to paint marijuana as the devil (and take attention away from alcohol).
Obviously nobody should be driving with any impairment, but people do - driving tired, texting, even talking to passengers and turning their heads to look at the passengers while they talk! (Really, why??? I see people doing this all the time.)
Per more Pew Research data, also from 2023, Ohio seems to have an average, if not a less than average, concentration of cannabis dispensaries, compared to other states where CBD products were legal. Montgomery County, OH is located in the bottom-left quarter of Ohio, and sits in a region with lower dispensary density than many comparable U.S. districts. [2]
Given that usage metrics mirror the national mean despite a lower-than-average retail presence, I think this dataset is a pretty fair "middle america" benchmark.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/723822/cannabis-use-with... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/29/most-amer...
Next, same stat for alcohol, that would be interesting.
Maybe adapt the THC threshold a bit to really only count people who recently consumed THC.
So you don't think that the alcohol industry is involved?
Of course you don't. So why make this argument?
Are you funded by Big Cannabis™?
I’ve applied this same rule when reading news or watching tv - if your immediate reaction is shock, surprise, or anger, think of a list of organisations who would monetarily benefit [1] from that article or show etc.
Nobody does a news story for the fun of it unless it genuinely IS news, but it’s been shown [2] that over 70% is PR pieces trying to make you think one way or another.
[1] money talks, and bullshit walks
[2] Australia’s Media Watch ran a piece about this a few years ago
Even if you dismiss all of the questions brought up in these comments like the use of mean levels instead of median, not accounting for tolerance of habitual users, or debates about the threshold for impairment, the 40% number in this study is without a doubt far higher than the number of people who have detectable levels of THC in their blood at any given time.
I see a lot of attempts to downplay the result of this study in the comments, but 40% having significant THC in their blood is a stunning statistic no matter how you look at it.
The fact that legalization did not impact the crash rates is also a strong signal that THC itself is not causing the crashes.
The presence of THC in the blood is not a reliable signal for intoxication, so further research is needed to draw any type of conclusion.
Finally, it's also been noted that there are some sample bias concerns because the data comes from fatal crashes where it was determined that a drug test should be administered after the crash.
What percentage of people who drive drunk have consumed thc within the time window of blood detection?
Now this is a more reasonable number
I really don't know why this number is significant. Accidents are situational and people who engage in situations where accidents are more frequent likely make other decisions about consumption and lifestyle which involve things like cannabis
Who cares?
You aren't going to elevate the behavior of the population by regulating a plant
Yes, it is a stunning statistic.
So much so, that in itself it makes it worth questioning the results of this study.
If 40% of fatal crash victims had THC in their bloodstream, and only 20% of the general population did, that would imply a 100% increase in chances of dying in a car crash from having smoked marijuana. That's an absolutely massive risk factor, the kind you would expect to show up very, very clearly in any kind of statistical analysis of car crashes.
But the other thing I've seen a bunch of people cite in this discussion is that there has been no statistically significant increase in fatal crashes following marijuana legalization.
That would imply that either there was no statistically significant increase in drivers high on marijuana since legalization, or there was no statistically significant increase in the likelihood of causing a fatal crash from being high on marijuana.
Based on our knowledge of human nature, the former seems incredibly unlikely (yes, there would surely be some people who would have been smoking pot before who just stopped hiding it as much, but there would also, just as surely, be many people who had been interested in getting high before, but who had been intimidated by its legal status or had no idea how to find a dealer until there were dispensaries opening in every town).
The latter directly contradicts the implication of this study—but this is only one study, and may have methodological issues that we are unaware of.
For example, in my doctor's questionnaires. "Have you used illegal drugs in the last year?" I'm always going to say no. I don't trust security and privacy enough to say otherwise.
And yes, for HN scrapers, I'll mention this is all hypothetical.
This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.
Surely this has been done?
Given that differing levels of THC impact people differently both because of potential "tolerance" in frequent users as compared with occasional users and individual responses to cannabis (and even different cannabis strains with varied chemical profiles). There may well be other confounding factors as well.
Cannabis does not affect everyone the same way. It doesn't even affect the same people in the same way every time.
As such, while the testing you suggest may well be useful over the long term, it will require large populations and repeated testing at varying levels of both subjective intoxication and THC levels in the blood over extended periods to get good data about how THC use (both in temporal proximity and overall usage patterns) causes impairment.
As anecdata, I can absolutely say that lower levels of THC consumption results in much more impairment if cannabis hasn't been used recently and higher levels result in less impairment if there has been recent use.
That's not to say that driving (or any high-risk activity) is appropriate while actually high. It is not. Driving while impaired (by anything) is a terrible idea.
That could mean they all had levels far exceeding most state impairment limits, but it also could mean most of them had trace levels, while a few had levels way above 30.7 ng/mL. So, it says fairly little.
Also (FTA) “Researchers analyzed coroner records from Montgomery County in Ohio from January 2019 to September 2024, focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC following a fatal crash”. That means there could be selection bias at play.
Finally, no mention is made on the levels of THC in the general population of of those driving cars. Both _could_ be equal or even higher.
I’m not sure one should blame (only) the researchers for these statements, though. Chances are they didn’t intend to find out whether THC use is a major cause of vehicle crashes, but only in whether legalizing THC use changed those numbers, and someone managed to get some more juicy quotes from them.
that wording definitely sets off warning alarms for selection bias. but it looks like there were approximately 350 traffic deaths in montgomery county during that period [1]. that probably about lines up with 246 drivers dying during that period, so it seems likely they tested all or almost all deceased drivers.
[1] https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/statepatrol.ohio.go...
How do you propose gathering that particular data?
So the median THC level is 0%.
Having 40% of people register high enough levels of THC to pass an impairment threshold is a remarkably high number no matter how you look at it.
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089085672...
My understanding of stoned drivers is they tend to be too conservative--waiting for the stop sign to turn green etc. If that's accurate it could also mean stoned drivers are worse at avoiding the mistakes of others.
> Note: This research was presented as an abstract at the ACS Clinical Congress Scientific Forum. Research abstracts presented at the ACS Clinical Congress Scientific Forum are reviewed and selected by a program committee but are not yet peer reviewed.
My guess is when it gets to peer review, one of the reviewers will request at least mentioning these limitations. As it was only an abstract, it’s possible the paper itself does mention these limitations already as well.
I'm not sure how THC intoxication could be measured, but blood THC concentration feels like an incredibly crude metric compared to BAC.
> In a review of 246 deceased drivers, 41.9% tested positive for active THC in their blood, with an average level of 30.7 ng/mL — far exceeding most state impairment limits.
Since COVID in CA, it feels like driving has become far more dangerous with much more lawlessness regarding excessive speeding and running red lights, going into the left lane to turn right in front of stopped cars, all sorts of weird things. But I can't tell if my anecdotes are significant. It seems that Ohio's impaired drivers have been consistent through the past six years though.
NYC has had the same effect since COVID, and over the last year or two it's gotten to the point where every single light at every busy intersection in Manhattan you get 2-3 cars speeding through the red light right after it turns. I bike ride a lot so I'm looking around at drivers a lot, and for the most part the crazy drivers seem to be private citizens in personal cars, not Uber or commercial/industrial drivers.
Very frequently when there is a newsmaking incident in which a driver runs people over in some egregious fashion, it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year. We know who these people are, we just don’t seem to have any motivation to actually do anything about it.
The city has published research on this, showing drivers who get 30+ speed camera tickets in a year are 50x as likely to be involved in crashes with serious injuries or death, but efforts to actually do something about their behavior are consistently stalled or watered down. Other research points to various causes, including backed up courts and decreased enforcement generally.
https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pr2025/nyc-dot-advocate-fo...
https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc-driver-behavi...
People shouldn't have their license taken away over 1 speeding ticket but there need to be escalating punishments that include license suspension, community service, jail time. If someone works their way through all of these and still ends up speeding then they can't be trusted to drive a vehicle on public roads.
Cars are a weird sort of thing, where they both are the justification for a surveillance state and lots of monitoring, but we also have extremely lenient penalties. It's difficult for me to understand how the US arrived at our current set of laws.
Maybe that shouldn't be the only alternative in our society
We're talking about NYC, they'll be fine without cars.
Start punishing these people severely so that they might serve as an example to the rest
AFAIK, all evidence says that people don't consider consequences. If they did, they wouldn't be behaving like that in the first place. Punitive punishment feels much much better for people who have a specific set of values.
Remember from recent history these people that had 34 arrests or 73 arrests and they're out murdering people?
Driving with license revoked or suspended was a serious charge and resulted in impound of vehicle and mandatory jail time. Repeat offenders would have their vehicles seized.
DUI laws similarly brutal. 2nd time offenders faced potentially life-altering charges and penalties. Get into an accident with injury to another person while DUI? Huge jail time. Felony DUI results in permanent loss of driving privileges.
Speeding 20 over the limit? Enjoy your reckless driving charge which is as serious a dui charge.
I read that getting a license back after a 2nd dui carries and average cost of $50k. Getting 2 dui's within 10 years automatically bumped 2nd dui to felony....no more driving for you.
Lax driving laws and penalties do nothing more than get a lot of people killed.
The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.
I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.
Driving while intoxicated is not a crime of desperation. Even celebrities are often caught for DUI despite being able to afford a full-time limo driver.
Most people who drive intoxicated have jobs and reputations they'd prefer to keep, and families at home they would rather not be separated from or have to explain an arrest to.
And to be clear, we can't solve all the problems with a single measure. I'd like to see not just better law enforcement, but also a social safety net that ensures nobody is ever starving or homeless.
1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.
> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.
I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
If only
To me the answer is quite simple for any of these. Treat repeated small infractions like bigger and bigger infractions. E.g. double the cost every iteration if it happens within a specific time frame.
Ok, you speed once? $100. Twice $200. Thrice $400. And so on. We only reset if you don’t reoffend for any speeding in 5 years. If you want to speed 20 times in 5 years, ok, go ahead. You pay $52,428,800.
Bonus points for making it start at something relative to your salary. People will stop at some point out of self-preservation.
If you don’t believe high fines work, drive from Switzerland to Germany. In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. While south of the border they behave very nicely on the street.
You could extend this to other crimes. Google and Microsoft happily pay fines, since it’s cheaper than what they make from breaking anti-trust regulations. If you doubled it on each infraction they would at some time start feeling the pain.
That is because in germany, cars are a religion substitute and just like there can be no speed limit on the Autobahn in general, there can be no real enforcement of speeding.
The fines actually increased a lot in recent years. Still cheap, though. And if there are radar cameras, they are often in places where speeding is quite safe to make money from fines vs places where speeding is actually dangerous (close to schools etc)
It is basically a archaic thing, the bigger the man, the bigger and louder his car and the faster he goes. It shows status.
So I imagine in New York City it works just the same. When the big guys like speeding and the big guys control the state .. then how can there be meaningful regulation of that?
(To confess, I like to drive fast, too. But not in places where kids can jump or fall anytime on the road)
Are you saying you can legally keep driving despite dozens of speed camera tickets in a year, as long as you keep paying the fines?
That's wild.
Around here (Melbourne, Australia), you'd lose your licence very quickly. A single speeding ticket is a minimum of 3 points off your licence (of which you have 12), and bigger infringements lose more points. So at most you could speed 4 times, but probably fewer. And it takes a few years for the points to come back.
If you don’t pay the tickets, your car is at risk of being booted, but if you don’t park on the street or choose to obscure your license plate when you do (how did that leaf get stuck there!?), there aren’t many repercussions.
There was an attempt at a program to actually seize these cars, originally it would have kicked in at 5 tickets/year for immediate towing, but it was watered down to 15 tickets a year triggering a required safe driving class. They sort of half-assed the execution of that, then pointed at the limited results and cancelled it altogether. There’s an effort to pass a state law about this, we’ll see if it makes progress.
At the risk of hearing a depressing answer...why?
Don't get it twisted, I agree with you. The US is far too tolerant of dangerous driving. We are too dependent on cars for travel, and this is a consequence of it.
If you had 30 speeding tickets issued in person, it would be a lot different than 30 speeding tickets issued by machine.
The only problem was the two counties had shared but not integrated records systems with each other, as well the state drivers license authority. For two years, my cases got jumbled around the three systems, triggering plate and license suspensions which lead to me getting pulled over four times in that two year period.
It eventually all got sorted out without a lawyer. I didn't have to pay for anything beyond the first two tickets, and many hours on the phone. What was really notable was that by stop number four, from the perspective of the cop who pulled me over, I was someone who had been driving with suspended registration and/or license three times in a row. I was allowed to drive away three out of four times including the last time, and one time the cop would not let me drive, he waited with me patiently until my wife could be dropped off to get the car.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but to be honest I was surprised how not a big deal it was to anyone.
If you go down to 0 points, your licence is suspended.
If you stay without a fine for long enough, you get back points.
Some countries have fines that depend on how much you make. Some countries will destroy your car if you really behave badly.
The mechanisms for keeping people off the road are also just weaker in the US—I believe the penalties for driving with a suspended license are comparatively lighter, plus if your license is suspended you can often still get a "restricted" license that still lets you drive to work.
If the car's owner is a company, the company must declare a default conductor for this purpose.
They do not, though, give an owl's hoot about yielding to straight traffic when turning. I suspect NY drivers are on a big group chat encouraging each other to cut off cyclists and pedestrians, by turning into their lane whenever they see one, and promptly parking there for an hour.
And there's the "squeeze", and "crowding the box". Almost like no car here is truly allowed to ever really stop so they're always gently rolling, just a little, juuuuust a little, just, maybe, I know it's red but maybe just a lil squeeze into the intersection, maybe, squeeze, ...
I don't know how to explain it but if you've been here you'll recognize it I'm sure.
Also, NYC has a different driving attitude than, say, Dallas. What people call aggression is often a difference in expectations. Drivers change lanes and merge far more assertively than in other parts of the country. As long as you aren’t causing the car behind you to panic brake, it’s considered acceptable. Hesitation from drivers tends to get more opprobrium than tight merges.
People block bike lanes and the box all the time. It’s annoying and you shouldn’t do it. But a lot of the rage is often unjustified. That FedEx truck needs to park somewhere and they aren’t going to roll over a fruit stand to do it.
It’s a dense, packed city. If you can’t give and take, you are going to hate it here.
Green means 'Go!'
Yellow means 'Go faster!'
Red means 'The next six cars may go through the intersection.'
Okay, the third part is a little hyperbolic.
The above is from the 1980s and AFAICT (I've lived here nearly 60 years) not much has changed.
To the OP, I'm not sure I buy into it being tied to THC which seems to be the implication. Canada isn't seeing this trend, afaik.
But the data here also show that it's a consistent level before and after legalization of cannabis in Ohio. So legalization of cannabis in Ohio did not cause a big increase in impairment-levels of THC in those who died in traffic.
A lot of people are trying to debate the impairment threshold or argue about mean vs median, but 40% of deceased drivers having this much THC in their blood would be a notable result for basically any sample of people for anything other than a music festival or something.
The number of people age 12 or older who report any THC use at all, even once, in the past year is around 20% (or less depending on the survey). Having 40% of a group register levels this high is a very eye opening result.
I remember the sad story of Eric Garner who was killed in 2014 while being arrested for selling loose cigarettes in Staten Island. Today, at least in NYC, you see people parked out in front of the same corner every day selling weed and loose cigarettes. Same people, out in the open. I'm pretty sure that's not a sanctioned dispensary.
Just shows how much things can change in ten years. For whatever reason, police and prosecutors just gave up in enforcing any kind of laws. Seems like an overreaction to whatever problems we had with criminal justice
https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/11nbnxw/san_f...
> Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said. Some engage in shoplifting as a trade, while others are driven by addiction or mental illness; the police did not identify the 327 people in the analysis.
Not clear if that's only in 1 year, but 6,000 arrests for the same 327 people means 18 arrests per person on average. Maybe if you see the same person shoplifting more than 5 times you put him away for some real time. 10 times? Hell even 20 strikes and you're out would make a real dent and serve as a deterrent.
There’s plenty of desire to increase prosecution rates in American jurisdictions but little desire to raise taxes high enough to pay for lawyers, judges, courthouses, and humane incarceration—let alone assistance for the otherwise innocent families of criminals. The victims of petty crime are usually poor or middle-class and therefore lack the political power to meaningfully change policy.
This is just not true. Most of this is organized exploiting a lenient justice system. From my original NYT article:
> Last year, 41 people were indicted in New York City in connection with a theft ring that state prosecutors said shoplifted millions of dollars worth of beauty products and luxury goods that were sold online.
The idea that these 300 people are just stealing bread to feed their families is a myth.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/retail-theft-in-us-cities...
But you might ask why are stores closing? Why is deodorant behind lock and key?
> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities.
Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.
Don't believe what's right in front of your eyes.
Nothing to see.
Wealthy people (mostly) didn’t own the Kias and Hyundais that were stolen en masse during the early 2020’s for instance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kia_Challenge
Targeting a wealthy person for property crime is a high-risk, high-reward scenario, but there is still the risk of enforcement. A poor person is a much softer target and law enforcement will almost certainly tell them there’s no hope of being made whole.
They got what they wanted--fewer Blacks shot by the police. But that's because the police weren't being as aggressive in doing their job. Crime rates went up, the number of Blacks killed went up--fewer by cops being offset by more from other criminals.
And we see the result of bail reform. The old system was not good--for lesser offenses they were typically sentenced to time served. This amounts to skipping over the determining guilt part of "justice". But when they took action on that they didn't notice that that was what was actually keeping them off the streets. The justice system simply does not have remotely the capacity to actually prosecute as many crimes as they catch.
https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=DS19750820.2.20
Since then, the SFPF have always had a culture of being above the law. The monopoly on legal violence thing can be taken a bit too far.
Are there any stats for incorrect crime reporting based on political leaning?
Your article is just another version of pretending disparate outcomes is proof of discrimination. Totally wrong, but not what you say it's saying.
As far as driving goes, any amount of drugs or alchohol is going to reduce reactions times, in addition to any impaired judgement or ability to control the vehicle. Even a couple of 1/10ths of a second in increased reaction time is enough to make the difference between braking in time and hitting another car or pedestrian/etc.
And not like running a late yellow, but a full on my-light-is-green-and-there's-a-guy-in-front-of-me-sideways
It has dropped a bit now though.
The trend I’ve noticed this year is turning right from the middle lane cutting off people in the turn lane.
Its possible for multiple lanes to turn without anyone cutting anyone off, but its also possible for people to turn right from the middle lane of the source street into the rightmost lane of the target street, cutting off people in the rightmost lane of the source street attempting to turn, or to make a right turn from a middle lane that is not allowed to turn, cutting of a legal right-into-any-lane from the rightmost lane when it is the only turning lane, so if someone explicitly says that's what they see and there is no available counterevidence that they are misreporting their observation, questioning it accompanied by a description of how it is possible for people to turn from multiple lanes into distinct lanes in harmony without anyone being cutoff is not particularly useful.
> the car on the inside is required to turn into the nearest lane (according to any state law I know)
That's the base rule in most jurisdictions, but there are places where it doesn't apply. See, e.g., for California: https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-veh/division-11...
"its also possible for people to turn right from the middle lane of the source street into the rightmost lane of the target"
So you've created hypothetical situations that are no more useful than mine. I specifically mentioned having to turn into the nearest lane. If that's not true somewhere, then neither would adjacent turners be allowed. I simply asked if they were really cutting the other people off.
WTF, YOU made the comment: "If the right lane goes straight"
You might as well say, "if the people on the opposite side of the road cross the median..."
https://forensicresources.org/2021/marijuana-impairment-faq/
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10149345/ [2]: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2024/08/the-pandemics-tenacious-gri...
https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/12/california-road...
there are days where it happens multiple times during one walk and weeks where it happens at least each day of the week.
i'm actually a car guy but when i drive if i see any pedestrians i always slow down and i take it even easier if i see they have small children or dogs since either can randomly stop or dart away.
We should not tolerate the ignorant and ineffectual response from lawmakers on this issue. Year after year, they refuse to do the right thing: make texting a DUI-level offense, with the same penalties. You could even argue that texting while driving is worse than DUI: Drunk people suffer from impaired judgment; sober people texting have decided to endanger and steal from everyone else while in full command of their faculties. It's despicable.
But we still need to address the rest. Radio is chokefull of ads and the usual radio content is often insufficient to overcome my loneliness, so I’m not gonna say it’s ok, but I listen to Youtube videos while driving. You can sanction me. But let’s make the radio less boring for the sake of safety.
I don't like ads either, but that doesn't excuse my responsibility to drive safely for the betterment of myself and my community.
the city essentially stopped issuing traffic tickets
Edit: no offense to Gen Z with my earlier comment btw. My reasoning was maybe we're failing younger generations with drivers ed so the blame would be on us anyway.
Also I've seen these strange patterns in many states in the last year+: Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Idaho, California
I saw another one where the car tried to turn right into an off-ramp with a line of cars waiting at the light. Like wtf, do you not see the wall of cars and headlights in front of you? Where are you going?!
The worst offenders are usually the older generations of countries where driving en mass is a recent thing. The old red guard uncles and aunties regularly run red lights cause who gives a damn about the law when you experienced the rule of the mob throughout your formative years. So parents and grandparents of students would be my guess.
Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.
I was noticing driving getting worse before COVID.
It is the plague of narcissism and individualism out there (which doesn't just affect "boomers" but also every millennial and zoomer that dreams of doing nothing other than becoming an "influencer" and posts their life on their Instagram).
Social media, low attention spans, cellphone and driving distractions, narcissism, and "fuck you, got mine" culture is going to wind up being to blame. It is a population-wide axis II personality disorder.
A low emotional intelligence driver, one with depression or low self worth, perhaps a psychological pathology like narcissism or nihilism. This is the type of person to initiate vehicular homicide. Intoxicant intake is a SUBSET of this group of variables.
The archetypical homicidal driver would of course have exceptionally high representation in cannabis use, and also likely cigarette use, and probably nitrous oxide but they don't measure that.
EDIT: what I will say is that dab culture is something beyond traditional cannabis use, and I could absolutely theorize that dab use in a vehicle is the new drunk driving.
The other question I have - my prior is that a bad driver (tired, drunk, high) is something like 70:30 odds of killing themselves vs some innocent bystander dying because of their actions. I have anecdotally heard of several sad tales where some guy is on his Nth DUI and kills an entire family, while he walks away from the accident without a scratch. Meaning are the rates of fatalities involving THC actually higher, but the detectably inebriated person managed to walk away without dying.
That said, almost everyone I know that consumes THC has no qualms driving while doing it, and many of them also at work. It's a huge peeve of mine.
I wonder how many of these people were under the influence of alcohol and other substances.
That said, I don't do either. I also wouldn't take any amount of weed while working, but I'd feel comfortable having a beer during lunch if appropriate (work lunch/celebrate, e.g.).
Its not a sample, it is the whole universe of analysis. (If you treat it as a sample of, say, US drivers killed in accidents in the same period, then errors due to sample size are probably the least of its problems.)
The article says the research was "focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC", and that the test usually happens when autopsies are performed. It doesn't say if autopsies are performed for all driver deaths, and it also doesn't say what exactly is "usually".
If (for example) autopsy only happens when the driver is suspected of drug use, then there's a clear selection bias.
Note that this doesn't mean the study is useless: they were able to see that legalization of cannabis didn't have impact on recreational use.
I thought this was common knowledge among physicians who have studied the subject.
That being the case, I'm not sure what the policy prescription should be here, if any.
The statistics for this seem suspect at best, I'll believe it once it's peer reviewed
Having said that, I think that effect explains only part of the 40%, but can't explain all of it.
No it wouldn't.
People make those excuses because it's weed, but you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol.
A similar result about alcohol would be the (hypothetical) statement that the rate of drunk drivers in fatal accidents was constant before and after the enactment of Prohibition.
I do agree that the fact that fatal THC% stays constant before and after legalization is a surprise.
(Not that it really matters since I don't buy for a second that anywhere near 40% of people/people-driving are high at any given time. I also don't put much faith in numbers in the abstract of a a yet-to-be-published study...)
THC in the blood doesn’t mean actively high for habitual users, which would be most users if THC consumption is high. It means recent use, but not clear impairment.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
It doesn't say anything about the distribution, only that the "average" (presumably, the arithmetic mean, a measure particularly sensitive to distortion by outliers) was at a particularly high level.
And the study doesn't seem to differentiate between the different types of THC either, some of which are not psychoactive at all and which people use to relieve pain and anxiety. There's quite a lot of people using non-psychoactive THC which wouldn't impair driving.
If 40% of the whole population has THC in them, we'd need a control population (maybe from earlier when thc was less prominent) to see if per capita deaths has meaningfully increased. I'd do the same study, tangentially, for tech workers to see if productivity has changed when controlling for other variables.
That would be true if you looked at a variable which is not influenced by driving, like the percentage that wear red jumpers, but one would hope that not everyone is reckless enough to be highly intoxicated and drive.
This is again THC apologizism, nobody would even begin to suggest this if we were talking about alcohol.
When we talk about alcohol, we explicitly separate presence from impairment using blood alcohol concentration. We set legal thresholds because studies show a sharp increase in crash risk above those levels, relative to sober drivers. If alcohol were evaluated by merely asking "was alcohol present?" we would massively overestimate its causal role the same way THC is being overestimated here.
The problem with THC data is not that baseline comparisons are illegitimate; it's that we lack an agreed-upon, time-linked impairment metric comparable to BAC. THC metabolites persist long after intoxication, so presence alone is a weak proxy for risk.
So applying baseline controls to THC is not "apologism", it's applying the same evidentiary standards we already demand for alcohol, so the opposite of what you said.
This is literally how safe legal limits were derived.
Why did you automatically assume the point of bias?
Well of course not, as the two drugs have completely different intoxication side effects.
If we are at 40% of the population being high at any given moment I think we are having extremely serious societal problems around mental health. Occasional use is not a big deal IMHO, but if a person is spending 40% of waking hours impaired that person has some serious unmet psychological needs.
I'm arguing that if the population data looks anything like the autopsy data, it would imply a massive epidemic of THC overuse.
Not really, due to THC content in the body not being a reliable indicator of impairment or even time since use.
If BAC were more like THC levels, I suspect the data would show 40% or more of the population has consumed alcohol - or, in your words, is drunk "at any given moment"
Interesting questions: * What is the baseline of consumption / THC level?
* what was the alcohol level in decesased drivers ? (e..g how many people only had alcohol, how many only THC, how many had both, how many had nothing.
* Are there other test scenarios where THC screening is mandatory that could help getting to the baseline ? Are there ways to get an approximate answer from sewers, like they did for Covid?
https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-topics/seat-be...
Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study (facs.org)
281 points by bookofjoe 15 hours ago | flag | hide | 420 comments
=============He says that he gets cars in that reek so bad, he can smell them from three bays away.
I suspect that we'll soon be seeing a rapid "pullover-test," and that will probably knock that stuff down.
This paper would need to go into way more detail to be at all useful.
40% is a staggering number, which makes me suspect that all it measures is Montgomery County police's pretty good track record for deciding when to test someone for THC during an autopsy
0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/581951/first-day-of-road...
There’s no way to normalize a result of 40% of a population sample having significant THC concentrations. That’s way higher than any conceivable sample of the general population.
But can't you account for 'type of car', 'type of road', 'commute length' as direct variables pretty easily without dipping into social/economic backgrounds?
Although it certainly isn't "easy" to measure all of this directly; there are thousands of that constitute the type of driving scenario that someone might engage in. Even just "type of road" isn't a single thing, it's hundreds of things.
Averages do not work that way! The average of 48, 48, 48, 3 and 3 is 30. The study findings remain interesting but the actual proportion of impaired drivers may be less than 40%.
50% of the people on this street get stoned before driving to work, every single day
dope isn't even legal here and even if it was DUI is wildly illegal
We can only cure this if we get serious about penalties because we can't undo murder and injuries
How about first time warning, second time weekend in jail, third time week in jail, fourth time month in jail, fifth time year in prison
Saying that in the country with world-leading mass incarceration mostly due to its decades long “war on drugs” which has very much not cured drug problems is a perfect example of putting ideological preconceptions ahead of reality.
I wish I could emphasize this even more.
There are some situations where certain types of punishments in certain situations will achieve societal behavior change.
There's a lot more where it doesn't and people absolutely to apply any kind of scientific thought to it.
> There's a lot more where it doesn't
Or, at least, not the behavior change you are hoping for.
The people who try anyway, mostly put the USA as fairly middling, nothing special either way.
That's what happens when you use criminalization and penal slavery to replace chattel slavery.
Conservatives love to deny this, but it doesn't make it false. That criminalization was an immediate, direct substitute for chattel slavery is extensively documented, and that the patterns of criminalization used for that purpose became culturally entrenched and spread (even where the particular practices on top of that served to make it a replacement for chattel slavery, like convict leasing, generally did not in their original form beyond the South, though commercial exploitation of coerced prison labor did become a widespread national phenomenon, even though there has been some winding back in some jurisdictions of that particular practice in recent years.)
Somehow every part of this paragraph just keeps getting less correct.
America doesn't have "world-leading" criminality by literally any metric you care to choose.
Even if it did, also having world leading incarceration rates might make a rational, scientific type fellow wonder about how those could both be true!
Also, those are not in fact the only alternatives. It's not even difficult to think of more than those two. Have you even tried?
that's why I proposed five steps starting with warning, weekend, then week in jail
if you spend a weekend in jail and don't change your behavior from doing something wildly dangerous yet absolutely not addicting, well then proceed to a year in prison
note I am not saying put people in prison simply for smoking dope, it's not legal here but there are no serious penalties if caught
I don't care what people do in their homes
You drive on the road stoned when I am riding my bike or running and put my life in danger, you definitely deserve some time to think about it behind bars
I've been "grazed" on the road many time over the years, I have no idea if people are drunk or stoned or just looking at their phones but I am okay with my five step idea for ALL of those cases, but they will never be caught anyway until they murder someone and then it's too late
Whats more, police officers already have a wide authority of judgement when considering these factors around marijuana impairment currently. Relying on subjective evaluation from FST and physical presentation will only result in a higher rate of non impaired drivers being imprisoned.
https://www.courts.wa.gov/subsite/mjc/docs/2024/Three-strike...
Those laws exist, and often result in people who should be receiving treatment spending years of their life in prison.
Someone who gets 5+ DUIs isn’t likely to be deterred by schemes like this
https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2025/11001/trau...
Researchers analyzed coroner records from
Montgomery County in Ohio from January 2019
to September 2024, focusing on 246 deceased
drivers who were tested for THC following a
fatal crash. When autopsies are performed,
drug screening is typically part of the
process.
For example if we took random samples of the population and tested them for marijuana usage, what percentage would test positive?
Next, this study is only talking about marijuana testing, how many of the same group also tested positive for alcohol (or other impairing drugs). Lets make up fake numbers and say 60% of total fatalities had alcohol or other impairing drugs and the overlap between them and marijuana use was 80% then marijuana is rather insignificant.
We have to have all the details so we don't fall into a base rate fallacy.
One possible reason: the “new recruit” people who are now willing to use cannabis BECAUSE it is legal are also rule-following by being willing to stay off the road after using it. Perfectly plausible to me.
For drunk drivers it’s rather easy to assess whether someone is impaired. With marijuana it’s not. So until we have a valid method of testing if someone is “too stoned to drive” we have to push back on any attempt to classify marijuana users as ineligible to drive.
And punish illegal users regardless of intoxication level. Medical users should just abstain from driving while in it.
> With marijuana it’s not. So until we have a valid method of testing if someone is “too stoned to drive” we have to push back on any attempt to classify marijuana users as ineligible to drive.
I agree. As someone who regularly consumes 250mg of edibles daily at a minimum, I’m sure my levels would be off the charts on a constant basis, even when sober. With the tolerance I currently have, it’d take a ridiculous amount to put me into a state where I felt driving wasn’t safe.
Thankfully society didn’t make exceptions. Eventually.
I see THC taking the same, slow, tortured approach.
Anecdote, I'm a user, by choice, and by habit/addiction. I was first exposed to it through, oddly enough, martial arts as a young teen. The punk rock scene of the 90s didn't help much either. Both me and my ex-wife were what you would call "techno-hippies". We would smoke as much weed as we could, and I would code and she would do her thing (she was a biologist so I have no clue, something genes). We had a rhythm and we liked the high grade one hit and you're good kind of marijuana.
When 2018 came around, The Farm Bill (tm) passed and it loosened the terms of what "hemp" was. The budding cannabis industry saw this as an opportunity to mess with genetics. They discovered that if you harvest early, immediately freeze it, D9-THC doesn't convert from it's precursor - THC-A. So then they started shipping "hemp" in the form of THC-A all over the states. All you have to do to "finish" the process is to decarboxylate it into D9-THC. However, there's also D8-THC which doesn't get you nearly as "high" and only lasts minutes. It, too, can be frozen to prevent it from converting from it's precursor - THC-A... What?!? So you really don't know whether it's D8 or D9 from the dispensary (and neither do they) and the quality is all over the charts.
I think this is why it's affecting driving so much. People who are used to the smoke shop D8 weed get their hands on some real D9 and it blows their minds.
God I wish we had a breathalyzer test for D9-THC. Without it, it's going to get legislated to the point where you're on the disabled "can't drive or operate any machinery, ever" list. You already give up your right to own a gun when you sign up for medical marijuana. (and when buying one, it asks you if you use...)
I'm definitely for making the roads safer, but I'm also pro-rights and liberties so this one is hard for me. Yes, there should be some legislation around marijuana, no it shouldn't be a schedule I-III but looked at like hops and barley. Tax the shit out of it. Like you do cigarettes. Don't prevent me from driving because I smoked a cigarette.
Also put a stop some of the bad actors and bad behaviors of growers (all night daylight…).
You’re not really going to win anybody over to the legalization side when you basically say that people can consume as much THC as they want and drive without any penalties because of testing limitations.
Literally in the summary
> While blood alcohol content (BAC) level represents an accurate measurement of alcohol impairment, the presence of THC in a driver’s body has not been shown to be a predictable measure of cannabis impairment.
But further on
> Because THC in the blood can result from both recent as well as past use, impairment cannot be inferred from blood levels.
Which other, less invasive methods cannot. Like alcohol, impairment is highly individual and so we set a threshold.
I agree we need to set a threshold for impairment. I just want that to be measured reliably so that people who had a brownie last weekend aren't getting in trouble.
Now blood tests show a 12-24 hour window of usage. Much tighter than the 2 to 30 days of other tests. In terms of window of time, that’s essentially good-enough.
Of course anyone who consumes cannabis has a strong desire for a tighter and more accurate test, but you’re really fighting against growing masses of irresponsible users.
If the problem is truly wide-spread like alcohol was (and still is), it’s just a matter of time before states or feds push for a good-enough (for the rest of us) solution.
I know this is a giant hairball and the downvotes and passionate discussion is why I said what I said but in the end, until we have a breathalyzer for THC, it is what it is.
Just one example of many:
Her attitude when asked to perform the field sobriety test was taken as a refusal and she lost her license, now with a DUI on her record.
We all like to think that these methods work, and they do most of the time, and yet there still are cases where a normal person is subjected to them and they deem them "unworthy" to pass.
"Say your ABC's backwards starting from Z"
I used to bike-ride a lot, but the number unaccountable drivers and the increase in dispensaries in the NYC tri-state gave me pause.