tremm said:
Does anyone know about how cannabis is handled?
I'd be interested in knowing how commonly people get tested/charged for it. And whether it's on-site at the side of the road, or at the station. And general stats/costs etc. I guess CBD is ok to drive with, since the blood test is for THC. (depending on state)
I assume if your car smells, or your eyes are red/glazed, you're likely to get tested? Probably a pupil test/sobriety test too.
The earlier video link about the guy arrested for DUI after blowing .000 sent me down a bit of a YouTube rabbit hole. In that example, it was pretty clearly a police officer getting into a dick measuring contest and making up excuses to arrest the kid who did not 'Respect his Authoritahy!'
It's clear the kid hasn't been drinking, so the officer pivots to marijuana. Which provided opportunity for seeing that side of things.
The problem with marijuana is that THC remains in your system well after psychoactive effects wear off. It's pretty easy to drug test at work and find out if someone has had pot in the past month. It's not easy to objectively tell if it's actively in their system and impairing them. It's not like a BAC test that is relatively clean, objective, and directly correlates with impairment.
So it seems that the primary way to test for it is that very specific and controlled tests have to be administered by specially trained and certified Drug Recognition Experts - DRE's. Most patrol officers are *not* DRE's. They could administer some of the same tests in the same way they might administer a field sobriety test, but they're not certified to give testimony about drug impairment.
As for the impairment caused by Marijuana, it doesn't impair motor control like alcohol does. But it does impair attention much like a cell phone or texting. Marijuana tends to cause people to hyper-focus on a single stimulus. Which is fun if you want to listen to music or eat corn chips. Driving requires taking in a LOT of stimuli and processing them all quickly. Under the influence of marijuana, it's much easier to get distracted by something going on inside the car or on the side of the road and be completely unaware of what's in the road in front of you.
As for legalizing marijuana or not... that's a separate issue. I quickly googled the topic, and found lots of conflicting information with individual studies showing increased accidents, no statistically significant change in car crashes, and slight decrease in auto accidents.
This AAA study seems to be the one most widely referenced. It makes mention that in the state of Washington more drivers involved in fatal crashes tested positive for THC in the 5 years after legalization than the 5 years before. I am not seeing mention that the rate of fatal accidents increased, just that more people driving tested positive for THC. But these results would also be consistent with taking marijuana on weekends and getting into a fatal car crash on Monday because you're texting while driving. They state, "The study did not attempt to determine if marijuana contributed to the crashes included in its latest research. It focused only on the prevalence of drivers who tested positive for active THC."
Evidence that points to some increase in accidents immediately after legalization of marijuana still finds that alcohol, cell phones, and distracted driving remained much greater causes of fatal accidents.
I am personally in favor of legalized recreational marijuana, so I am biased.