I got t-boned by a totally baked driver that ran a red light…
The other time that I got hit was by a stone cold sober type-A who probably would have benefitted from a little mellowing.
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Of course, driving while knurd is the riskiest behaviour of all.
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I wonder if driving a car stoned is more or less safe than riding a motorcycle sober.
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First off, I definitely agree that being intoxicated in any way is probably (probably) not safer than driving sober. However, the twofold conclusion doesn’t really seem to match any of the studies I’ve seen in the past.
This is a very interesting statistic that I couldn’t really find verified anywhere - just kind of repeated around. I see the study talking about being able to pass a field test, and the postmortem test (which verifies that the increase is not twofold)…just no metastudy, which seems to be what you’re referring to, rounding up the data with a “twofold” conclusion. Both studies pointed to in the article to support the “double” idea were on Field Sobriety Tests, yes?, which are notorious for not actually reflecting the ability to drive safely.
Also, wasn’t Dr. Romano’s test based on testing samples taken from fatal crashes? How do we test for THC if not doing a controlled study? We take tissue and blood samples, right? Problem being that THC remains in your system for much longer than the actual active effects would change your ability to operate a vehicle, so that doesn’t really seem like useful data at all. UK Department of Transportation (2000) said in regards to these sorts of studies
Current methodologies can only determine the presence of cannabinoids, not evidence of impairment. Thus, not only is it problematic to estimate the percentage of accident involvements associated with cannabis use alone, there is no evidence that impairment resulting from cannabis use causes accidents.
So let’s look at studies that used controls, or focused on “ability to drive” over “ability to pass non-driving tests”.
The US Department of Transportation did a study and found that:
Drivers under the influence of marijuana retain insight in their performance and will compensate when they can, for example, by slowing down or increasing effort. As a consequence, THC’s adverse effects on driving performance appear relatively small.”
And this rather complete and controlled study for the UK Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Road Safety Division) found that:
Its effect on higher cognitive functions, for example divided attention tasks associated with driving, appear not to be as critical. Drivers under the influence of cannabis seem aware that they are impaired, and attempt to compensate for this impairment by reducing the difficulty of the driving task, for example by driving more slowly.
Here’s another from US Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Administration saying that when examining 2,000 fatal crashes:
The THC-only drivers had a responsibility rate below that of the drugfree drivers. … While the difference was not statistically significant, there was no indication that cannabis by itself was a cause of fatal crashes"
…which seems to match what Dr. Romano was saying with the “adjusting for the presence of alcohol” part.
Here are a couple of useful links of the subject:
EDIT: Oh wow. I didn’t notice that you were the original article author, so I’m just going to assume that you know quite a bit more than what’s included in the article, or that I’ve collated over the years in my passive interest. Regardless, it’s excellent to have more discussion about this in general. 
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Congrats on getting on the front page of NYT! I read the article there before realizing who the author was.
This sticky topic is the reason so many law enforcement agencies hate the idea of legalizing pot. With family in law enforcement, the discussion has always been about how to tell if someone was stoned right then and there or not.
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A number of years ago, I actually saw a study that indicated that people who were already intoxicated became better drivers when they became stoned as well, for precisely this reason, essentially. Alcohol made people overly confident in their diminished abilities, whereas cannabis made people more cautious. Still (and even more) impaired, but not impaired and reckless.
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What’s wrong with a precautionary principle?
Everything. Until the precautionary principle is applied to alcohol as well (which I don’t believe it should be) I will continue to drive around stoned.
especially when public transit or designated drivers are an option
Idiotic drug laws mean it’s far worse for your own legal outcomes to carry weed on public transport (where you are, depending on the time and day, highly likely to encounter drug dogs) than in your car. Designated drivers are an option but stoners don’t keep the same hours as regular folk. We’re blazing until the wee hours and the straight people aren’t gonna hang around to facilitate us getting high. Moreover if the designated driver is pulled over and people are holding then, in many parts of the world, they also put themselves at risk for no reward.
@maggiek You’ve clearly not read my rants in the comments sections of any post where someone raises the concept that you’re society’s scum if you drive while stoned, to which I always respond with a link to a book that specifically deals with all the myths that relate to marijuana. In the relevant section (pp 67&68) it addresses two studies that have looked at the relative fatality dangers - one relating to driving stoned vs. driving under the legal limit and one related to driving stoned vs. driving after any alcohol. Here are the relevant sections:
So while the text makes clear that driving stoned is not “safe”, it also makes clear that driving while stoned is less dangerous than driving after drinking to the levels we legally permit… So the question becomes: if one is tolerated by society, why should the other not be?
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When it comes to marijuana’s effects on motor skills the most relevant factors are: how frequently has the person smoked before and how often has the person done the activity they’re trying to do while stoned and while sober. These factors are more important than anything else in relation to how well they’ll be able to do something while high.
In terms of a person’s proficiency to “function” it really depends on what the activity is, and what sort of margin for error there is. Everyday tasks do not require much of our attention and as such are pretty easy to execute and I would including driving in this group. I would sincerely doubt that any of these people are exactly as effective at the various tasks while stoned and while sober but the change in performance is not noticeable for most activities.
In some instances the effects of the marijuana might help specific aspects of a task. I personally feel I play COD a whole lot better if I’m a bit stoned than if I’m not and I think this relates to acting more calmly when presented with a situation. OTOH if I’m very stoned I know I play much much worse. A friend of mine used to beg for weed before playing indoor soccer because he believed that he would score more goals while stoned than while not. Whether or not this was a placebo effect we’ll never know but he in fact did seem to score far more goals on the days he had smoked.
The other task that marijuana helps with (in my personal experience) is enduring frustrating problem-solving. I would much much rather develop a website while stoned than while not because troubleshooting code is immensely frustrating and abstract. If I were sober I would likely throw my hands up and move onto something else, but if stoned I am happy to sit there and fight these abstractions until the code is doing what it’s supposed to.
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My guess is more safe.
how to tell if someone was stoned right then and there or not.
Impossible. As my other comments make clear, I drive around stoned frequently and I am happy to drive pretty much anywhere at any time. This means I’ve been stopped for a random breath test (alcohol) while stoned many many times. If you’re polite, if you have your drivers licence ready, if you make an effort to speak clearly and coherently and (most importantly) if you pass the breathalyser the cop will send you on your way. I’ve previously gone to the police station 20 mins after smoking some bongs to report an incident and the cop had no idea. I’ve previously been taken to the station and questioned (not about drugs) after having smoked weed, taken a tab of LSD and a couple ecstasy pills on NYE… the cop, again, had no fucking idea I was high.
Meanwhile the cops will start treating you super suspiciously if you have an eye infection.
I have 30 more years of experience in all things than I did last time I drove high. I’m not a big time stoner anymore, but I know my response: it renders me clumsy and stupid. In a fun way. Always has.
In some ways you seem to make my point for me: your own response is different from mine, yet you apparently assume that’s just because I don’t smoke enough pot. Whereas in fact I know from ample experience that if I smoke and try to do anything remotely demanding I am very likely to fuck it up, no matter how well I do that thing when sober.
I don’t know whether your response or mine is the norm, and there are other variables we can’t possibly account for, but I do know I’m not alone.
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I had a ‘classic’ Vespa, and (as is the custom) was locked in to the eternal struggle with constant, ongoing mechanical and electrical failure. One night, I was riding home after a particularly heavy ‘session’. I was stopped at the lights and I noticed that the engine was ticking over perfectly. That bubbly arrhythmic ‘ting’ as it idled had real fire and energy.
I watched the lights carefully, and when they phased to green, I twisted the throttle and really dropped the hammer. The engine lit up, and roared. Once it hit the power band it got louder, as it sucked in cool night air and just hummed. I was fully grooving to how well my bike was running. The Vespa engine is kind of crude, but there is true beauty in its simplicity. Here was an engine that I had rebuilt by my own hand, that I had an intimate connection to, and it was singing.
After about 20-30 seconds, I became cognisant of the car horns honking behind me. I watched as the light phased to orange, and then red. I was sitting at a standstill. The bike was never in gear. I had just spent the green phase zoned out in near orgasmic rapture, revving my scooter. The next minute or so of opposing light phases were super awkward.
Being baked can give you an intense attention and focus, but there is no guarantee that you will be focussed on the right thing at the right time.
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You didn’t answer the other relevant factors: how often have you driven stoned and generally how frequently do you get stoned?
There are obviously variations person to person, but I don’t think they’re much more pronounced than variations in reactions to pharmaceutical medicine, which aren’t terribly variable when you control for other relevant factors (sex/weight/age).
PS: I’m not encouraging you to drive stoned… I agree that the best policy is for each person to make their own educated choice. What I’m saying is that if you got stoned for a week while taking a driving course I think you wouldn’t feel the same way about it. I know that the feeling of being stoned is clumsy and stupid (hey… it’s not called getting stoned for nothing) but unlike alcohol it is possible to control and suspend that feeling when you need to.
It’s a catch-22 I’m not willing to break. To drive better stoned, I need to drive stoned more often? No thanks. By the time I achieved competence something dire would probably happen. An analogy: I cooked dinner stoned plenty of times, and no matter how many times I did it I never stopped making stupid mistakes that I’d never make sober, and even cut myself seriously once. I eventually had to make a rule: no more smoke before cooking. Period. It has served me well.
Driving is actually easier than cooking in many ways, but the consequences of the small, silly mistakes that come from losing focus are generally far more serious, so I just don’t got there.
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I’ve had almost exactly the same experience. Except it was with a stationary elk, and we managed to clip its antlers and didn’t notice for about a mile. I’m pretty sure we broke its neck. We were going like 80mph in the middle of the night out in Montana. We didn’t check to see if the (possibly alive and enraged) elk survived.
No more stoned driving for us.
I also managed to hit two telephone poles in one week after having literally two beers. Not even buzzed. That second time I decided not to drive if I’d had any alcohol.
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The risk is quantified in the linked story. Stoned driving is about twice as dangerous as just plain ild sober driving.
Maybe… maybe not… via my previous post here.
Source for quotes below (A very good read and VERY well sourced, IMO):
" … Alcohol at 0.75 g/kg (slightly less than four standard drinks) causes high levels of impairment in psychomotor performance and medium-to-high levels of impairment in such tasks as critical flicker fusion and short-term memory. Alcohol impairs pursuit tracking, divided attention, signal detection, hazard perception, reaction time, attention, concentration, and hand-eye coordination.
Alcohol also reduces the perceived negative consequences of risk-taking, which can increase willingness to take risks after drinking, the amount of risk-taking behavior while driving, even at low alcohol doses, and the incidence of road traffic accidents while driving drunk.
…
Surprisingly, given the alarming results of cognitive studies, most marijuana-intoxicated drivers show only modest impairments on actual road tests. Experienced smokers who drive on a set course show almost no functional impairment under the influence of marijuana, except when it is combined with alcohol.
Many investigators have suggested that the reason why marijuana does not result in an increased crash rate in laboratory tests despite demonstrable neurophysiologic impairments is that, unlike drivers under the influence of alcohol, who tend to underestimate their degree of impairment, marijuana users tend to overestimate their impairment, and consequently employ compensatory strategies.
Cannabis users perceive their driving under the influence as impaired and more cautious, and given a dose of 7 mg THC (about a third of a joint), drivers rated themselves as impaired even though their driving performance was not; in contrast, at a BAC 0.04% (slightly less than two “standard drinks” of a can of beer or small 5 oz. glass of wine; half the legal limit in most US states), driving performance was impaired even though drivers rated themselves as unimpaired. Binge drinkers are particularly likely to rate themselves as unimpaired, possibly because they tend to become less sedated by high doses of alcohol. … "
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I will never drive stoned again … I shot out onto a main road that my road was converging onto without noticing a stop sign OR the huge 18 wheeler coming in the opposite direction
I’ve zoned out while sober and crossed through a stop sign before. I’ll never drive sober again.
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FTA:
For instance, states that legalize recreational marijuana, Dr. Kleiman said, should ban establishments like pot bars that encourage people to smoke away from home.
Then we sure as hell need to work on banning establishments like “alcohol bars” that encourage people to drink away from home, correct?
Dr. Kleiman is being ridiculous. If society can’t handle “pot bars”, then we certainly shouldn’t have bars that serve alcohol which is a incredibly more dangerous drug than marijuana on multiple levels.
Let me know when Dr. Kleiman says we should ban bars that serve alcohol and then I’ll take him remotely seriously on his ridiculous “pot bar” recommendations.
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I’m pretty sure I could get as stoned as possible (which isn’t that much since I’m chronic) and pass any driving test with flying colours.
My ability would unquestionably be impaired a few percent, but as the article points out it’s in a benign way next to alcohol’s vicious circle, and I have driving ability to burn by the truckload before I drive as poorly as the average Melbourne motorist.
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I’m not suggesting that they are the exact same thing, but to offer an imperfect analogy, you can binge on sugar or you can binge on booze, but both can lead to diabetes. From a moral perspective, it doesn’t really matter if being stoned is a bit safer than being drunk because on the whole both make people worse drivers. When safe transportation alternatives are available (not always the case), why insist on driving stoned, and even if you think you are okay, why not err on the side of caution? If there are no other options, why not consider staying put until you are sober, or not getting stoned in the first place?
I do hold it against stoned drivers, not because I’ve lost someone personally, but because stoned drivers have caused accidents, as have people on phones, people eating hot dogs and people who speed excessively. Sober drivers cause plenty of accidents too, but at least they did something to minimize risk by not getting stoned or drunk before driving.
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