"how are you to know when it’s legal to drive? ","When will your THC level be below the 5-nanogram threshold?"

This is an easy one to solve!

If you're going 20% or more BELOW the speed limit, you're too high to drive.

Problem solved.

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Right. We've built our cities so that seniors attempting any degree of independence are just too doggon dangerous to have around, along with everyone who likes to kick one too many back. So we must kill the geezers off -- or at least warehouse or consign them to the ghettos -- and incarcerate the rest. It's the only way. And did I mention what an inconvenience kids are, having to be driven everywhere all the time? Blah. Raise 'em in vats until they're twenty. Then they can remain permanently between the ages of twenty-one and sixty like all the rest of us really-smart people who drive like jackasses will...

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We've built our cities so that seniors attempting any degree of independence are just too doggon dangerous to have around

No one has stopped people from building walkable communities. It's just that too few people think about the future. And the .gov definitely doesn't think about the future.

Being one who did a lot of driving on both alcohol and weed years ago, I can tell you the difference for me. Stoned, I would forget temporarily where I was going, though I was going the right way. Once or twice, I took off at a red light after someone pulled up to my right and turned right on red. I still almost do that. Fortunately, I wasn't hit and even didn't almost cause an accident, as it is a reflex I look at the traffic before I take off.

Drinking, on the other hand, the tendency at a certain level of drunk is to speed or for some people, to go too slow. Once in awhile, you see double, which can be fixed by closing one eye, but that only happened a couple of times. I could actually see better at night after half dozen drinks. Also, I played a reflex game at a bar several times and what you did was push a button, once the clock started running. I got quicker after 2 or 3 drinks, maybe because I wasn't so apt to jump the gun, which resulted in a penalty.

The effect isn't standard on people. Some people are bad and indecisive drivers and alcohol makes this worse. Many of them shouldn't have a license even if they didn't drink. Kids drive much more dangerous than older people and once a certain age is reached, I think drunk driving gets worse. Having ridden with some drunk drivers, I wouldn't recommend it. I know for a fact I handled a car better than most people I had ridden with who had been drinking. Most of them were driving on the median, on the sidewalk and a couple had severe accidents. I probably drove 100,000 miles intoxicated in my 20's and 30's and never had an accident or ended up in a ditch. A little of it was luck, but mostly I attribute it to knowing where I was going, keeping my eye on the road and not passing out. I got caught more than once, generally by an officer with orders to arrest someone. I was right on the limit every time I was caught. Today, I would have probably been caught 3 or 4 times for each time I was caught then, if I was still doing it.

Brew said:

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It sounds like this would help get half the idiots off the road that don't belong there, because they just flat-out suck at driving.

I rode on a tour bus last week down to a Jimmy Buffet concert. After the trip I reached conclusion that cigarettes may be good for my health. The logic is simple. I was watching the drivers we were passing, one-third were driving and watching the road, one-third were smoking a cigarette and watching the road, one-third were texting and not watching a damn thing! If we assume that half the smokers are not texters and half are, then their smoking preempts their texting and makes them a safer driver. Their being a safer driver reduces their chance of wrecking me, thus imporving my health.

Flap

The only situation this test would not catch, as far as I can see, is somebody driving while texting or messing with a cell phone, as they are only momentarily impaired.

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Drinking, on the other hand, the tendency at a certain level of drunk is to speed or for some people, to go too slow.

Do about 5 over the speed limit at all times.. obviously not recommended for known speed traps. If you do exactly the speed limit or heaven forbid below the speed limit, every cop who sees you is going to wonder what you're so worried about.

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Also, I played a reflex game at a bar several times and what you did was push a button, once the clock started running. I got quicker after 2 or 3 drinks, maybe because I wasn't so apt to jump the gun, which resulted in a penalty.

I'll second that notion, 2-3 drinks will make you better at basically everything. Reactions become smoother and less jumpy. By beer #6 though it's safe to assume you're back at or below baseline. Anyone whose driving I trust sober I'd still trust after a 6-pack (consumed at a reasonable pace), past that point though a lot of variables come into play.

Just read yesterday that the single largest group of drivers is the over 70 crowd

People can drive quite well that have smoked marijuana. It is really a Reefer Madness and Cheech and Chong stereotype that suggests the opposite. If one smokes sativa, expecially, which imparts an alert, up effect, there is no problem driving.

Data decides, not preconceived biases based on no good information.

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There are already commercially-available reaction time testers that measure actual hand-eye coordination and thus impairment. They map very well to driving ability and are roughly like a small handheld video game.

Equipping police departments with these would provide actual evidence of impairment and be cause-neutral. Whether your impairment was caused by weed, booze, lack of sleep, prescription pills or simply old age, you either can react quickly enough to drive competently or you cannot.

The test is objective and maps to the actual skill required to operate at a reasonable level of safety.

This means, of course, that it would "catch" a lot of people who shouldn't be on the road but are, and many of them would be caught for reasons other than "intoxication" per-se. But this is how it should be -- we should be insisting on a basic level of ability irrespective of how it is achieved or what substance(s) you might have -- or not have -- in your body.

That works for me. I was diagnosed with an ear tumor in 2004. After it was removed in 2005, I had severe "vertigo episodes" for about 18 months. I never knew when they would happen. Scared the crap out of me. I got rid of my car and didn't drive anyone else's for about 20 months. It just seemed to me to be the responsible thing to do. About 5 months after the surgery, I had to renew my drivers' license. Since it had been over 7 years since my last photo, I had to go in person. I did tell them about my vertigo spells and their utter unpredictability. To my surprise, they didn't care about my admission of impairment at all. They just wanted my $35, or whatever it cost to renew at the time.

I would never have taken the risk to drive a car in the state I was in at the time. It was just amazing to me that the Oregon DMV didn't seem to care in the least. Of course, I was way more naive then than I am now.

a reaction test may be good for just that however it cannot account for impaired 'judgement' or 'loosened' judgement. Not that sober necessarily infers good judgement any more than the opposite would, but a reaction test is only a partial answer.
Edumacation that the windshield is harder than your head and it's really bad to run into people and things is ultimately the best answer.

reaction time could measure impairment.

but it's more complicated. because an 80 year old could be too impaired to drive like a teen, but be safe to drive like an 80 year old man.

doesn't your need for cat like reflexes depends on how quickly you're in the habit of trying to move through the given space, how much focus you ordinarily give the task in the 'real world', and how easily you can anticipate events before they've completely unfolded (mostly based on experience behind the wheel)?

to cite a less extreme case, i'd guess most 16 year olds have faster reflexes than i do, but insurance adjusters consider me a lower risk for accident.

There's a decent amount of standard deviation in human reaction time, but there's also an upper boundary beyond which you can't reasonably stay in your lane and operate safely. Set the boundary clear of that and if you fail you shouldn't be on the road.

I know an eminently responsible non-drinker who recently sideswiped a car in the other lane. Why? He had been working over 30 hours straight in the hospital and had a momentary lapse. He doesn't remember crossing the lane.

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I know an eminently responsible non-drinker who recently sideswiped a car in the other lane. Why? He had been working over 30 hours straight in the hospital and had a momentary lapse. He doesn't remember crossing the lane.

Exhaustion is just as bad as the drink. I had a similar situation. Was up for 27+ hours, trying to finish and deliver important documents before an internal deadline. I was at one point asleep, still typing, writing gibberish for a good 2 pages. When I snapped out of it I could believe the junk on the screen.

Isn't the point of "Weed" = impaired...?

The quality is poor but this is a good clip from a BBC test on cannabis drivers.

The results may shock some of you more innocent readers.



My own personal experience, and that of most of my friends, mirror what was shown in this clip. This was a very unbiased and honest look at the effects of driving while stoned.

ETA....Dak.... not always. For some of us it is an alternative to the drugs they wish to prescribe for anxiety and ADD. The side effects to those prescribed drugs are intolerable for me and leave me in a state of dysfunction. Using mother natures cure a few times a week when I cannot focus using breathing or meditating allows me to get focused and accomplish what needs to be done. That said yes occasionally I will not do it in moderation and get "intoxicated". However those days are far and few between the older I get. Life and responsibility just dont allow for it if you wanna have anything in this ****ed up world.

Not knowing what one of these video game like tests actually does, I'm not sure I believe it. Marketing material will tell you that it can detect everything that might be bad but reality may be very different. More than likely it would be sold as another revenue enhancement.

One of the car magazines (road and track or car and driver or some such) did a marijuana driving test years ago and they found that pot did not impair driving skills. What it did was impair concentration.

Drivers time through the slalom actually improved but the drivers got lost trying to find their way back to the starting line in a parking lot. They basically just forgot where they were going and what they were doing.

Frankly, I'm not sure that I agree that even alcohol's danger is related to reaction times. I think it's more related to mental state. When alcohol makes a person aggressive, invincible, unconscious, or just stupid; that's the problem. Back in my drinking days I used to retain enough sense to adjust my driving style to my perceived intoxication levels. Maybe I was good, maybe I was just lucky but I managed to avoid any damage. However that was a world that had a lower population density. My freedom to swing my arms is a lot smaller now that everybody else's nose is so much closer.

I could go along with this kind of test if it really tests valid driving related competence. It would help if the criminal justice system was not the direct beneficiary of all the fines. Too much conflict of interest.

I can't look at that BBC clip right now. I hope it agrees with my memory of the magazine test.

In my younger years I argued the impairment issue and lost my job a few times (getting a job took minutes for me in those years because I walked on water at CAD design and CNC programming).

Just out of college I came up with an invention to save my employer literally millions of dollars in product liability lawsuits. They offered me a full time position and I failed a pee test (my aim was fine). It was quite a dilemma for them. I argued the impairment test issue and that what I did on my own time was none of their damn business.

Did it again a few years later when a random test popped up and I blew it. My employer offered me rehab or quit voluntarily. I quit. The HR staff stood with their mouths hanging open because I had come there and completely turned around my department in three months. Screw 'em. I pointed out that a turret press operator showed up to work drunk every day, but they didn't test for that.

A few more years down the road I had to take a pre employment test. The results didn't come back for two weeks by which time I had already slayed every dragon in my department. We stood toe to toe in the GM's office and he decided to put me on 6 month probation with an expectation of a random in that time. It never happened and I worked another 6 years with that company, during which the conversation never came up.

I can reinforce the video game immersion. As a high school punk my performance was 10 fold better if I was baked.

I once told a Motorola hiring manager that I'd provide a***** sample when he was willing to collect it in his mouth.

I didn't get hired

At MCSNet my policy was that if you were intoxicated or otherwise impaired, irrespective of the reason, while on the job you were fired. That was formal policy and was rigorously enforced. I didn't give a **** what you did on your own time.

^^^^^^^^^^A Drug Policy That Makes Sense^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Flaps10 and lurkers

I was turned on to a great product when I entered the .Corp world for 3 short years in my late 20's. (Worst and least profitable years of my life) I have turned hundreds of others on to it and have never seen a false positive or someone fail using it.

A test like that could come with a moderated penalty. The person should be off the road period until/if he can recover.

If the impairment is due to some activity - as drugs or alcohol- that is where the real punishment begins. Fining and imprisoning someone for being sleepy is absolutely ridiculous.

I used to live in Clearwater. I have seen people being issued licenses to drive that were clearly impaired - mentally and physically! One man was clearly senile and it was trying the patience of the examiner (and mine) during the eye test. He also could not move without severe tremors.

It is amazing the amount of accidents or near accidents that have been caused by SENIOR CITIZENS that are already too impaired to even have a license to drive.

If you want to stop this problem - it needs to stop at the root! Start with denying licences to those people that already have significant physical or mental impairment! Good luck with the politically correct crowd with that one.

The Obama death panels with the healthcare law may actually eventually force doctors to report their impaired patients. Once that is done I'm sure the patients on medications that cause impairments will be next.

Congrats - your mobility has again been limited by the health care system. Thank you AARP <sarcasm>.

This can now trickle down to denial of 2nd Amendment rights. You are now a true 2nd class citizen. You can't leave on your own and you can't defend yourself either. Thank you for your contribution - now please step into the incinerator peacefully.

Genesis wrote..

At MCSNet my policy was that if you were intoxicated or otherwise impaired, irrespective of the reason, while on the job you were fired. That was formal policy and was rigorously enforced. I didn't give a **** what you did on your own time.

With the PPACA decision, the governmental corrective to those kind of lax policies will be simple. For instance, by taxing the employer some percentage of the tort should their employees commit one due to drug use at any time during the tenure of their employment. And maybe even after termination, if it can be "proven" that said employer was lax providing the "troubled" employee "help" during the time he or she was employed. "Fair" is "fair," after all...

Yep. I wouldn't start a business nowadays neither.