Colorado lawmakers struggle to define: What's too high to drive?
People attending an Amendment 64 watch party celebrate after a local television station announced the marijuana amendment's passage in Denver on November 6, 2012. / AP Photo/Brennan Linsley
Jon Marley was driving down a snowy country road with a friend, smoking a blunt.
He had done it many times before; getting high, blasting some music and going for a drive. The 23-year-old from Tennessee said it used to be a favorite pastime of his.
These days, he doesn't recommend it.
"I was driving, going slow because it was icy, snowy. I was going 10 to 15 [mph] down these roads," said Marley, who founded the website WeedSmokersGuide.com. "It was secluded. I ended up going around this turn ... and I pushed on my brakes to slow the car down. The car didn't slow down, it went straight into the fence."
It was icy outside and could've happened to someone who was sober. But because he was high, Marley said he didn't "realize what was going on."
"I don't think people should be smoking marijuana and driving at all," Marley said.
Like many Americans, Marley was thrilled to learn that Colorado followed Washington State and is legalizing marijuana. For advocates of the drug, it was a major victory. For lawmakers, however, it's just the beginning in a long list of new regulations that need to be addressed, including driving under the influence.
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Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper signed two executive orders on Monday:
- One officially adds Amendment 64 to the state's constitution, making it legal to smoke or consume pot.
- The second sets up a task force that will deal with all the other laws that come with it, from licensing and taxing to advertising and employment, before licenses to sell the drug for recreational use get doled out by 2014.
And for a state government, dealing with DUIs involving marijuana is complicated.
Colorado governor on marijuana legalization
"This is a bit of unprecedented territory, so trying to find the right approach has proven difficult and cumbersome," Rep. Dan Pabon, a Democrat appointed to the task force, told CBS News.
In simplest terms, it's difficult for legislators determine whether or not someone is too high to drive because different amounts of THC, the active chemical in cannabis, affect people differently.
Lenny Frieling, the chair of the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws (NORML), says the correlation between consumption amount and inability to drive is not as clear with marijuana as it is with alcohol. The higher one's blood-alcohol level, the more drunk they are -- most people above .08 are too intoxicated to drive, he said. That correlation is not as definite with cannabis, although Frieling notes that marijuana can impair driving. Studies show the drug can cause dizziness and affect attention span.
"We want people to have nice experiences, when something is being enjoyed recreationally," Frieling said. "Car crashes are not recreational."
Eric, a 25-year-old from New York, disagrees with Marley and says smoking weed actually helps him drive. He says he'll smoke when he's feeling tired because the drug makes him more aware.
"I notice the signs more, and the lights," he said. "I think it makes me drive better ... You just want to avoid trouble at all costs. It would be unfair if [the laws] were the same as drunk driving."
Eric, who asked CBS News not to publish his last name because smoking or selling marijuana is illegal in New York, said he's never been in an accident while high.
"My safety becomes way more important to me, just because of what the drug does to you," he said.
Marijuana now legal in Washington state
Active THC is measured in nanograms per milliliter in the blood. Washington State, which legalized marijuana last week, has set the driving limit to 5 nanograms per milliliter. That level was also tested in the Colorado legislature last session, but failed to pass.
Current Colorado law states if someone is caught driving under the influence of codeine, prescription drugs, or marijuana -- Pabon calls it "drug-driving" -- law enforcement must then determine whether or not the person's ability to drive was impaired. But getting that type of proof is difficult.
The Task Force is brand new and they haven't chosen a direction they want to proceed in regarding a nanogram per milliliter limit, Pabon said.
One strategy definitely on the table will be "rebuttable presumption." In this situation, a person caught driving with a certain level of THC in their blood has the opportunity to defend their case and a jury later decides whether or not they were actually impaired.
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That certain level, however, is what Colorado legislators are unsure about.
"What we're learning more about is how you measure impaired driving," Frieling, the chair of NORML, said. "If you can stand on one leg and bounce up and down does that mean you can drive or not?"
Pabon agrees there should be a limit, rather than a zero-tolerance policy. "Someone can be high speeding, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their level of THC caused them to speed. They could be a bad driver," Pabon said.
Even if smoking weed and driving is legal to an extent, Marley, the 23-year-old from Tennessee, said he wouldn't risk it. What happened in Washington and Colorado is a big deal, he said, and "you don't want to screw that up."
"They can retract those laws, and then you're back to square one, where [they think] we're just dumb people using it the way we shouldn't be," he said.
The Task Force, which consists of 24 members from all levels of local government, has two months to work out all the complexities of Amendment 64, according to CBS Denver. They are set to have their first meeting on December 17 and are expected to make recommendations by Febuary 28. Rules and regulations are slated to approve on July 1 of next year.
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http://blogs.lawyers.com/2012/04/cruising-the-high-way-safer-than-drunk-driving/
One study, entitled "Medical Marijuana Laws, Traffic Fatalities, and Alcohol Consumption" conducted in November 2011 provides evidence that marijuana is a safer substitute for alcohol when it comes to health and also makes for safer drivers.
Top Ten Reasons Marijuana Users Are Safe Drivers
When you combine all of the main results of these two decades worth of scientific research studies, the following 10 reasons marijuana drivers are safer than drunk drivers comes out like this:
1. Drivers who had been using marijuana were found to drive slower, according to a 1983 study done by U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA). This was seen as a factor in their favor, since drivers who drank alcohol usually drove faster and that is part of the reason they had accidents.
2. Marijuana users were able to drive straight and not have any trouble staying in their own lanes when driving on the highway, according to a NHTSA done in 1993 in the Netherlands. The study determined also that the use of marijuana had very little effect on the person's overall driving ability.
3. Drivers who had smoked marijuana were shown to be less likely to try to pass other cars and to drive at a consistent speed, according to a University of Adelaide study done in Australia. The study showed no danger unless the drivers had also been drinking alcohol.
4. Drivers high on marijuana were also shown to be less likely to drive in a reckless fashion, according to a study done in 2000 in the UK by the UK Transport Research Lab. The study was done using drivers on driving simulators over a period of a month and was actually undertaken to show that pot was a cause for impairment, but instead it showed the opposite and confirmed that these drivers were actually much safer than some of the other drivers on the road.
5. States that allow the legal use of marijuana for medical reasons are noticing less traffic fatalities; for instance, in Colorado and Montana there has been a nine percent drop in traffic fatalities and a five percent drop in beer sales. The conclusion was that using marijuana actually has helped save lives. Medical marijuana is allowed in 16 states in the U.S.
6. Low doses of marijuana in a person's system was found by tests in Canada in 2002 to have little effect on a person's ability to drive a car, and that these drivers were in much fewer car crashes than alcohol drinkers.
7. Most marijuana smokers have fewer crashes because they don't even drive in the first place and just stay home thus concluded more than one of these tests on pot smoking and driving.
8. Marijuana smokers are thought to be more sober drivers. Traffic information from 13 states where medical marijuana is legal showed that these drivers were actually safer and more careful than many other drivers on the road. These studies were confirmed by the University of Colorado and the Montana State University when they compared a relationship between legal marijuana use and deaths in traffic accidents in those states. The studies done by a group called the Truth About Cars showed that traffic deaths fell nine percent in states with legal use of medical marijuana.
9. Multiple studies showed that marijuana smokers were less likely to be risk takers than those that use alcohol. The studies showed that the marijuana calmed them down and made them actually pay more attention to their abilities. All of these tests and research studies showed that while some people think that marijuana is a major cause of traffic problems, in reality it may make the users even safer when they get behind the wheel.
10. Marijuana smoking drivers were shown to drive at prescribed following distances, which made them less likely to cause or have crashes.
.. stick *that* in your pipe, and smoke it!
http://www.theweeklyconstitutional.com/news/headlines/1035-why-you-should-always-spark-up-before-hitting-the-road
But, unlike with alcohol, the accident risk caused by cannabis, particularly among those who are not acutely intoxicated, appears limited because subjects under its influence are generally aware of their impairment and compensate to some extent, such as by slowing down and by focusing their attention when they know a response will be required. [Allison Smiley. Marijuana: On-Road and Driving Simulator Studies]
This response is the opposite of that exhibited by drivers under the influence of alcohol, who tend to drive in a more risky manner proportional to their intoxication.[United Kingdom's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. The Classification of Cannabis Under the Misuse of Drugs Act of 1971. 2002: See specifically: Chapter 4, Section 4.3.5: "Cannabis differs from alcohol; ... it seems not to increase risk-taking behavior. This may explain why it appears to play a smaller role than alcohol in road traffic accidents."]
For decades, marijuana advocates have argued that pot has a significantly different effect on driving ability than alcohol. But if you take the word of one auto insurance company, stoned is actually the safest way to drive. 4AutoinsuranceQuote.org is making that case based on years' worth of scientific studies, including some from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration that found motorists under the influence of marijuana tended to drive slower and have accident responsibility rates lower than those of drug-free drivers.
http://blogs.lawyers.com/2012/04/cruising-the-high-way-safer-than-drunk-driving/
There are actually TWO DUI laws in most states.
One is - it's against the law to drive with a Blood Alcohol Content of over 0.08%. This is considered the LEGAL INTOXICATION limit and anyone over that amount is pre-determined to be affected by the amount of alcohol in their system. A blood or breath test in performed and a measurable amount is recorded.
The other is - it's against the law to drive while impaired by alcohol. "IMPAIRED" is a subjective term. Test can be given - field sobriety tests - that can lead an officer to believe that the amount of alcohol used has impaired the subject's ability to perform DIVIDED ATTENTION tasks (like driving - or field sobriety tests).
SO - while they may never be able to test someone's blood to determine the level of intoxication - law enforcement WILL be able to subjectively state that someone's impairment (or not) is due to a DRUG that they've taken. This will require further training of law enforcement personnel. In other words - big deal.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/27/teen-pot-use-iq_n_1834392.html
The testing and research is supposed to be done BEFORE you approve the use of a drug. You state that you 'tend' to only use pot when you are tired - well does it really make you less tired? What does it do to your reaction time? Are you truly more alert or do you just 'feel' more alert. Testing to back up your comments? Bet that it doesn't exist.
The problem is Colorado and other states are gambling with the live of their residents. They allow these laws to be passed because it's politically good for them. They are more concerned about elections than the real public good. That's the breakdown in our countries process. Reasonable behavior has gone away to preserve political positions.
Until the data and criteria for determining the level of influence pot has been figured out - approving the use of pot without proper and scientifically based laws is nothing short of stupid. Sorry but that's the nicest term I can find to use to describe these actions.