Based on the headline, I was guessing it was any amount of positivity, and may be close to the population level, but it's actually impairment levels of THC:
> 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.
>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
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.
It’s a very widespread problem, I think, and probably has a complex mix of causes, but my perception as a NYC runner, cyclist, and driver is that there’s a fairly small percentage of extremely antisocial drivers who we allow to behave badly with relative impunity, which itself moves the Overton window of driving behavior towards aggression/chaos, so to speak.
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.
the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty. In most of the country, you are completely dependent on a car to hold down a job, get groceries and pretty much anything else. In most other countries, not having a car is a mild to moderate inconvenience you can work around.
Why do we care about this type of sentencing to poverty and not every other way we condemn our citizens to poverty, homelessness, starvation, and death?
Maybe that shouldn't be the only alternative in our society
The alternative is that we invest in better public transport and walkable infrastructure. then we can both increase penalties for driving badly AND raise the bar for getting a drivers license in the first place.
That's not a good reason. Other forms of criminality and reckless behavior don't get this kind of extreme leniency.
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.
Drivers licenses in most if not all of the U.S. are a joke, and people will still drive with suspended licenses, especially if they have to for work. Driving on a suspended license should allow the state to impound your car, though, then it would be respected.
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.
>it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year
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.
Some countries have a points system, where every infraction gets points in addition to the fine. At a certain amount of points you lose your license. Pretty effective dissuade serial petty infringers!
I have noticed this going between Switzerland and Italy in particular—all of the cars going incredibly fast on the autostrada seem to have Swiss plates!
"In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. "
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)
When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.
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.
Unless you live in NYC or a handful of other places, an adult in the US who can't drive (or afford to pay someone to drive for them) is in the equivalent of economic-social prison. Almost all personal transportation infrastructure is designed around car travel, anything else is at best an afterthought and at worst impossible.
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.
I'm just shocked that you can have that many offenses and not be in jail. I nearly lost my license in high school with FAR less than 30 incidents. That amount of leeway just doesn't make sense at all, you're so obviously a danger at that point.
I once drove my car a month after it's registration expired. I was pulled over twice in the same day on the same ride home from work, in two separate counties in two separate legal systems. Completely my fault of course. I went to the courts of each county on the appointed day on my tickets, explained what happened to the clerks and had both tickets waved after showing proof of current registration.
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.
For these reasons, many countries have adopted a point-based system for driving licences. E.G: in France you have 12 points, driving over the speed limit is a fine, but also removes up to 6 points depending on the speed.
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.
New York actually does have a points system, but since they're tied to the driver's license rather than the car itself, you only get them if you're actually pulled over, not from cameras. Within NYC there's a fair amount of camera enforcement, but comparatively very little by the police directly, so drivers whose licenses might otherwise be suspended via points are still driving around.
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.
Funny I ride a bike in Manhattan & BK (but only post COVID) and I very rarely experience cars going through reds. IME cars here respect traffic lights and stop signs. I try and count cars actually running a red ("speeding" through it) and it's rare, say 1/mo tops. Ymv I guess :)
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.
I remember seeing a PSA that it was legal to park (one row of cars only) on bike lanes in specific situations: In emergencies, when being arrested by cops, to get medecine for a sick relative, nearby schools at school time to pick up the children, to drop off a delivery, to pickup bread at the bakery when it’s very short, and when nearby car parks are full. I think it was on April Fools.
The worst are assholes "blocking the box" while there is space to pull forward along the curb or even the neighboring lane. This should be a tripled fine, simply for the monumental level of douchebaggery displayed.
I haven’t seen driving behavior change in NYC over the past two decades.
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.
I’ve lived here my entire life, and there’s a significant difference between normal “aggressive” driving and many of the driving patterns that have emerged post-COVID. For example: blocking the box is (unfortunately) somewhat normal, while running through red lights and making illegal turns has (anecdotally) increased significantly.
Could we verify this against data? Surely if people are trying way worse post covid, that would show up compared to pre covid data by way of accident, fatality, and ticket issuances, e.g.?
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.
Those who are autopsied due to traffic deaths clearly show a massive amount of THC impairment.
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.
> I was guessing it was any amount of positivity, and may be close to the population level, but it's actually impairment levels of THC:
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 think it's lawlessness overall. For instance, consider San Fransisco traffic citations. Went from around 11k in 2014-2015 steadily down and then fell off a cliff during covid but never recovered (around 1k in 2023).
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
I think it’s underappreciated the degree to which police and LEO have started behaving like political actors. NYC cops decided to “strike on the job” when the city started changing its stance in the mid-2010s, and in the Bay the cops responded similarly to Prop 47 by effectively not prosecuting shoplifting and other minor crimes anymore. Similarly, the recall of Pamela Price started almost the moment she took office and was accompanied by a work slowdown by the OPD in the interest of making the crime situation look worse. There’s other examples, but effectively the police have turned lax enforcement into a tool to preclude any shifts in policing policies. I’ve got my own feelings about those policies, but when you’ve got the cops acting like a political block that gets to set policies instead of a group of city employees tasked with enforcing them, I think that should concern the rest of us.
There's probably some of this, but I think it's driven by district attorney not prosecuting people. We see people that have 20+ prior arrests. How many times can a cop arrest the same person and do the paperwork if he's not going to be prosecuted? I don't think people are pushing police to arrest more people.
> 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 probably some of this, but I think it's driven by district attorney not prosecuting people. We see people that have 20+ prior arrests. How many times can a cop arrest the same person and do the paperwork if he's not going to be prosecuted?
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.
> 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.
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.
Yeah, I always wonder why we can't have an "n strikes and you get the electric chair" type of law, where n can be decided. Clearly at that point that person is better off not alive.
It's not entirely new! In 1975 during labor negotiations the police detonated a bomb on the mayor's yard, partially damaging the front door, and left a note saying "Don't threaten us":
I do believe you’re mixing up Michael Brown in Missouri who robbed a gas station and assaulted a cop and attempted to steal his pistol (per your own link) with Eric Garner in New York who was choked out by a police officer and subsequently died.
It's the same everywhere. It seems like police have just stopped enforcing traffic laws. Multiple times per week someone runs the red light in front of my local police station, in full view of an officer in their car, and nothing ever happens. Same with the multiple near-misses I see every week. They don't care, and since there are no consequences, there are no longer any traffic laws. Couple that with the mass psychosis afflicting the US, nobody seems to care about anything and just drive as fast and hard as they want to, and fuck absolutely everyone else.
The numbers do appear quite staggering. It can't just be the dead drivers - there must be similar numbers of stoned drivers who are causing accidents, maybe killing others, while surviving themselves.
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.
Are they cutting them off, though? If the street you're turning onto has two lanes, it shouldn't be a problem for two cars to turn at once. The car on the inside is required to turn into the nearest lane (according to any state law I know), so why can't the car on its left turn into its own 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)
"cutting of a legal right-into-any-lane from the rightmost lane"
"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.
If you're in San Francisco, the city essentially stopped issuing traffic tickets when COVID started. It's no wonder lawlessness increased. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/xMUFt/mobile.png
We've seen the same uptick in reckless driving in CO since Covid. Reddit Denver complains about it all the time. I think it's happening everywhere, and it's not clear why.
One of the lesser known dictatorship plays: the ostensible increase of police presence with a proportionate and perceptible increase in crime lead the public and local governance to embrace harsher rule of law and violations of their rights under the auspices therin.
The most galling and pervasive offense, though, is TEXTING. The rampant texting while driving is killing pedestrians (and other drivers), leading to oft-cited statistics about the failure of "Vision Zero" and the increase in pedestrian deaths. Not to mention the millions of hours stolen from us all by people BLOCKING TRAFFIC while texting.
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.
Yeah. Well on one side, sharing location on Whatsapp has reduced by 90% the need to text while driving.
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.
Before this year I had only seen 1 wrong way driver in 30 years. In the last year alone I've seen 6! I saw one person going the wrong direction in a round-about. Another person going over the inner portion of a round-about. People stopping in the road for no reason. It's insane. The strange driving patterns is indeed a major issue. I thought it was maybe a Gen Z thing, but often times these people seem to be between 30-50 in age.
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
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.
I'm mostly talking about white college students, though I can think of one instance of a Nepali colleague's grandma hitting sometime in our parking lot and almost hitting my car in another incident.
I'm not talking about one-ways, those are confusing in general. I'm talking about clearly marked off-ramps from freeways. In one situation the person had to drive over a fairly large bump in the median just to enter the wrong side of the freeway; again many signs to prevent such a thing and they still ended up in that predicament. Sometimes miles down the freeway before a cop pulls them over. It's terrifying.
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?!
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.
It is crucial to consider correlated variables in their correct context. This finding does not even imply impairment.
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.
reading the paper, I’d say this is a case of hoofbeats meaning horses- people are just getting high and crashing.. Although, this seems like a case where the average is very vulnerable to a ‘spiders georg’ type distortion, especially because of the tolerances people build.
> "average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
An issue with having the legal limit at ~2-5ng/ml is that it makes habitual users be over the limit if they have smoked recently or not.[0] Making the prohibition seem unserious to some, not about safety but about punitive control, and in turn making it matter less if you smoke and drive as you are taking the risk of getting into trouble in any case.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
I’ve never been a smoker, but I’ve known a lot of friends who went through periods of smoking multiple times per week or even daily for periods of time.
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.
It depends on the level of your habitual use. A 5mg gummy every evening is probably fine.
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've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.
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.
That's not quite the same though. The claim is that because I'm a habitual user, I'm always impaired. Which amounts to over 100k miles of impaired driving over the last decade.
Being freshly high is probably 2 quick beers, I'd think I was baseline after maybe 45 minutes. A massive edible might be 5, and I'd take like 3 hours I'd guess.
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.
If we're doing anecdotes I'm sure there are lots of drunk drivers with spotless records.
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.
There’s also an association with having drank water and been in a car crash. This on its own can’t reasonably inform any opinions, more context is required.
> There’s also an association with having drank water and been 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.
> 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
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.
"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)".
I think serious studies would be strongly preferred here, as compared to anecdotes or conjecture. I don’t even know if I disagree with your stance, it’s just an absence of data is not convincing.
not exactly. Depends how you consume it. Smoking, yes probably. The other forms of cannabis are less obvious. They are clearer highs without smell or smoke and much less burnout.
Well, it would be good for the rest of us on the road if people driving two tons of murder box are 0% impaired.
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.
There are some occupations where we aspire to that low level of risk. But it would mean that driving can't be an everyday activity for ordinary people.
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.
That's probably not the thing to tell a parent whose kid just made a dent and a black smudge on a MachE. I don't want to over index on the "think of the kids" argument, but we don't take driving seriously enough. Wikipedia says:
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.
The linked article is astounding. The attitude in this thread is astounding, too. Because driving is ubiquitous and necessary in most of the US, we've become too accepting of the problems. Yes, if you're hitting the vape pen every day you should absolutely not be driving. Jetlagged? Take an Uber. Stroke risk? Give us the keys.
Zero degree of impairment is only possible if we don’t have access to 2 tons of murder box.
I think the way cars dominate roads and our public spaces and how they are being used is inherently dangerous.
I know this is going to get downvoted by people who cant imagine an alternative but it’s possible all the same.
I borderline want a conscription-style policy, where young adults are required to live in Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, DC, Seattle, or Chicago, car-free for a year. Americans’ inability to even imagine a world where a car isn’t the way to get around is really a problem.
If you calmed down and stopped snapping at everyone, you might understand that I'm writing about how the law and a lack of studies could make some people more willing to drive high. You are substantially diminishing the quality of the discussion here.
The average (presumably arithmetic mean, though it could technically be any of a wide variety of measures) is not particulatly interesting, the median specifically would be more interesting, as a single figure.
> 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.
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.
One helpful data point is that only about 20% of people over age 12 report any THC use at all in the prior year. Some surveys have even lower numbers, around 1 in 8, but let’s take the highest number for the sake of this comparison.
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.
Came here to say most of this, also worth calling out the note at the bottom:
> 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.
Self driving cars can’t come fast enough to save lives. I’d love to have states start today at cracking down on unsafe drivers of all kinds. I suspect that converting just 10% of miles to self driving + getting rid of 10% most unsafe drivers would reduce fatalities 50%.
Some helpful context: The number of Americans age 12 and older who report using any marijuana product at least once in the past year is around 20% (Source https://apnews.com/article/marijuana-cannabis-alcohol-use-di... ) if I use one of the highest reported use numbers I can find.
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.
Wish the paper were available - would love to know the percentage with alcohol.
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.
There is a very common sentiment among weed users that it doesnt really count as far as driving goes. Stoners will be repulsed and outraged by drunk drivers and then think nothing about going for a "blunt ride"
My friend group in college were heavy weed users, and generally all of them drove while high. I remember one saying he enjoyed it because he felt like he was driving a space ship. I asked if he still thought it was safe to drive, given that impression, and he said yes.
I drove high a few times when I was younger and I had to set my cruise control to 25mph to make sure I was going fast enough haha never again. I just use before bed now or occasionally during the day if I know I won't have to drive anywhere.
Even though their sentiment is wrong, I get why they would feel that way. Marginally drunk vs marginally high certainly feel* very different in how they would impact my own ability to drive.
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.).
The number of times I've heard "I'm good" honestly breaks my heart. Only to have people call me "Hermoine" etc (I am a straight cis man). I wonder what's the best way to talk about this
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.)
We don't know that. We don't even know if there's selection bias.
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 don't think it is that simple. I would wager $$$ that dead drivers tend to skew younger, mostly young men who think they are great drivers, drive way too fast, pass with little margin, etc. Young people probably skew higher for THC use as well.
Having said that, I think that effect explains only part of the 40%, but can't explain all of it.
No need to be judgmental about statistics. They are just facts.
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.
It absolutely would. If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect. I find it unlikely 40% of people test positive for THC, but yes, it does matter.
That wouldn't actually mean no effect, you need 40% of people driving to test positive for it to be no effect. It's unlikely the population driving is equivalent to the population at large - for one there's a set of responsible people who won't drive while high. For another weed use isn't randomly distributed through the population but correlated with certain subsets, which probably have a non-average rate of driving just by coincidence.
(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...)
There is a case for the two populations to be quite similar.
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.
The article is not saying 40% of all drivers tested positive, it’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
> It’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
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.
The levels described are actually pretty low. The "legal limit" is so low for THC that anyone who's had THC in the previous days could test positive, even if they aren't "high" at the time of driving. It isn't quite the same as the BAC legal limits for alcohol. And it doesn't account for body weight, tolerance, and other factors that definitely contribute to how a driver reacts no matter how long it's been since they consumed THC.
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.
Yes, it would be useful. When controlling for variables, you normally want to compare against a baseline.
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.
> 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.
> “An average level of 30.7 ng/mL generally means those people must have consumed marijuana at some time close to driving. This isn’t about residual use; it’s about recent consumption.”
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.
This reading doesn’t make sense. There’s no way to extrapolate from this to any statement about 40% of the population, and even 40% of the day is a serious misread imo.
> 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"
There is no mention that these drivers were ONLY impaired by weed. But I can’t believe a paper would not look at the confounders. I know quite a few who are not regular smokers but will imbibe after a few beers if it’s being passed around. Also weed is popular with consumers of stimulants. Without knowing the possible confounders, this statistic tells you very little.
One useful point of comparison here would be the percent of the driving population overall who have some THC in their system in the same way as these researchers are measuring it. I wouldn’t guess that 40% of drivers would test positive for recent THC use, but I can’t understand the 40% number here without knowing the percent for the overall population.
The number of people who use any THC at all isn’t even close to 40% thought. The highest survey numbers I found had 20% of people reporting any use, even once, in the past year.
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.
My question is, what is the difference in vehicle death mortality since cannabis was legalized in those parts of the country. If it's about the same, it just tells me that cannabis is a very popular drug.
From what I understand, the effect of legalization (or decriminalization) on the amount of cannabis use is not straightforward at all. You'd have to factor that in somehow.
The lack of change after legalization of recreational use is interesting. How many deaths related to medical use versus (previously illegal but decriminalized) recreational use?
This stat beggars belief. I think the headline is phrased incorrectly, and the overall stat is misleading. The actual stat is only from dead drivers who were tested for THC.
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.
The unanswered and unaddressed questions here are, how often and why were the THC tests administered? The article says that’s standard for autopsies. But how often are autopsies conducted on deceased drivers? I would be truly surprised if it’s 100%. In fact, I would expect it to happen only in cases where there was some suspicion of intoxication. In which case, this finding isn’t very surprising after all.
This feels like we’re missing a dimension or threeve, the one that comes to mind immediately would be whether or not the deceased driver was at fault for the incident.
Yeah, drug use is also influenced by social and economic status, which also influences driving risks. People of lower socioeconomic status drive less safe cars on less safe roads for longer commutes. This is something valid to evaluate with a drug like THC which is detectable long after use. It would be nice to see the distribution of levels detected and not just the average.
> People of lower socioeconomic status drive less safe cars on less safe roads for longer commutes.
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?
The socioeconomics of the situation is why I'm questioning it, not what I think would be best measured.
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.
I’m not surprised so many deceased drivers were under the influence of THC. I see people smoking and vaping at stoplights all the time. I am however, surprised this study claims legalization didn’t change the rate. Anecdotally, on the west coast, I’ve seen far more of this, and also people casually smoking in public spaces (parks or train stations or whatever) since legalization.
Obviously the study is not claiming that rates of THC use in general remain the same.
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.
Are they necessarily smoking and vaping cannabis though? My vape is visually pretty similar to a tobacco vape, and vaping doesn't usually have much odor either way (unless it's scented vape juice, but I'm not terribly worried about cognitive impairment from bubble gum).
Remember when people in this web site would blame the recent increase in accidents on the supposed cognitive decline from COVID and how hooked we are on our phones because of the evil tech companies.
> We can only cure this if we get serious about penalties
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.
> 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.
We have world-leading criminality rates. Given that, the only alternatives are world-leading incarceration, or just letting criminals roam around making law-abiders' lives worse.
most people who get put in jail/prison for drugs do not get a "taste" of how horrible it is and get years right off the bat for first offense
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
Driving towards a solution of "imprisoning more people" as punishment rather than other punishment have never succeeded. Many states already have first time drug offender and strike programs, people are already imprisoned over a weekend for things even as simple as misdemeanor possession until they can get a bail set. Rehabilitative forms of punishments such as severe fines, community service or mandatory classes and broadcasting them is much more effective in actually driving down rates of impaired drivers.
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.
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.
Well, its the wrong universe of analysis to make that claim and there is no comparative measure of alcohol exposure in the same universe of analysis so it also fails to provide a basis for any alcohol/THC comparison, so, no?
Just noting there’s a difference between THC in your system and THC in your blood. THC leaves the bloodstream after your high. Goes into fat cells and other areas to be broken down and processed (up to a month) later. Having it in the bloodstream after an accident means they were intoxicated at the time according to science. Whether their CB1 receptors were letting it through is another matter. I can smoke a lot of weed and not “feel high” yet I would test off the charts on this test.
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.
> I can smoke a lot of weed and not “feel high” yet I would test off the charts on this test.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That link doesn't appear to say that blood tests are reliable
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.
It is not a reliable indicator of recent use though, since it can also indicate past use.
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.
Driving isn’t a right. No matter how steeped the US is in car culture, it’s important not to lose sight of this.
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.
THC leaves the bloodstream within 24 hours just to be clear.
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.
Then develop more empirical measures of impairment. A device that tests response time, etc. Doctors have been doing that with a hammer to the knee for decades, optometrists do it with a headset that flashes lights where you have to press a clicker, etc. - we have the tools.
And field sobriety tests are routinely challenged in court because they aren’t objective and at best, they’re taken into consideration with other things like BAC.
my ex-girlfriend challenged this in court last year and lost. She was pulled over coming home and forced to take a field sobriety test. She was angry and was refusing, trying to explain that she just got off work. They arrested her for DUI. Called me to get the vehicle with her crying in the squad car. I bailed her out of jail for $500 two days later. Her BAC was 0.
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.
Based on the headline, I was guessing it was any amount of positivity, and may be close to the population level, but it's actually impairment levels of THC:
> 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.
>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
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.
It’s a very widespread problem, I think, and probably has a complex mix of causes, but my perception as a NYC runner, cyclist, and driver is that there’s a fairly small percentage of extremely antisocial drivers who we allow to behave badly with relative impunity, which itself moves the Overton window of driving behavior towards aggression/chaos, so to speak.
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...
Yeah I feel like the United States could dramatically improve its road safety if it kept maybe 1-3% of its drivers off the road permanently.
the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty. In most of the country, you are completely dependent on a car to hold down a job, get groceries and pretty much anything else. In most other countries, not having a car is a mild to moderate inconvenience you can work around.
Why do we care about this type of sentencing to poverty and not every other way we condemn our citizens to poverty, homelessness, starvation, and death?
Maybe that shouldn't be the only alternative in our society
The alternative is that we invest in better public transport and walkable infrastructure. then we can both increase penalties for driving badly AND raise the bar for getting a drivers license in the first place.
That's not a good reason. Other forms of criminality and reckless behavior don't get this kind of extreme leniency.
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.
Drivers licenses in most if not all of the U.S. are a joke, and people will still drive with suspended licenses, especially if they have to for work. Driving on a suspended license should allow the state to impound your car, though, then it would be respected.
Sounds like a good reason not to commit traffic crimes then.
Start punishing these people severely so that they might serve as an example to the rest
Has that ever worked?
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.
>the problem is that our urban planning is so F@#$ed that taking away someone's ability to drive is tantamount to sentencing someone to poverty.
We're talking about NYC, they'll be fine without cars.
>it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year
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.
Some countries have a points system, where every infraction gets points in addition to the fine. At a certain amount of points you lose your license. Pretty effective dissuade serial petty infringers!
I have noticed this going between Switzerland and Italy in particular—all of the cars going incredibly fast on the autostrada seem to have Swiss plates!
"In Germany the Swiss have no problem speeding, because the fines are laughable. "
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)
What the heck? How can you get that many tickets and still have a license? (Or manageable insurance costs for that matter lol)
When New York State authorized the NYC speed camera program they explicitly precluded it from reporting to insurance, and made it not part of the “points” system that triggers license suspension if you accumulate too many infractions, so all that happens is that you get a $50 ticket each time.
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.
Unless you live in NYC or a handful of other places, an adult in the US who can't drive (or afford to pay someone to drive for them) is in the equivalent of economic-social prison. Almost all personal transportation infrastructure is designed around car travel, anything else is at best an afterthought and at worst impossible.
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.
I'm just shocked that you can have that many offenses and not be in jail. I nearly lost my license in high school with FAR less than 30 incidents. That amount of leeway just doesn't make sense at all, you're so obviously a danger at that point.
It's simple. People drive without a license. Having a license doesn't preclude someone from driving a vehicle
I once drove my car a month after it's registration expired. I was pulled over twice in the same day on the same ride home from work, in two separate counties in two separate legal systems. Completely my fault of course. I went to the courts of each county on the appointed day on my tickets, explained what happened to the clerks and had both tickets waved after showing proof of current registration.
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.
Perhaps they don’t have either.
For these reasons, many countries have adopted a point-based system for driving licences. E.G: in France you have 12 points, driving over the speed limit is a fine, but also removes up to 6 points depending on the speed.
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.
New York actually does have a points system, but since they're tied to the driver's license rather than the car itself, you only get them if you're actually pulled over, not from cameras. Within NYC there's a fair amount of camera enforcement, but comparatively very little by the police directly, so drivers whose licenses might otherwise be suspended via points are still driving around.
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.
Funny I ride a bike in Manhattan & BK (but only post COVID) and I very rarely experience cars going through reds. IME cars here respect traffic lights and stop signs. I try and count cars actually running a red ("speeding" through it) and it's rare, say 1/mo tops. Ymv I guess :)
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.
I remember seeing a PSA that it was legal to park (one row of cars only) on bike lanes in specific situations: In emergencies, when being arrested by cops, to get medecine for a sick relative, nearby schools at school time to pick up the children, to drop off a delivery, to pickup bread at the bakery when it’s very short, and when nearby car parks are full. I think it was on April Fools.
The worst are assholes "blocking the box" while there is space to pull forward along the curb or even the neighboring lane. This should be a tripled fine, simply for the monumental level of douchebaggery displayed.
I haven’t seen driving behavior change in NYC over the past two decades.
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.
I’ve lived here my entire life, and there’s a significant difference between normal “aggressive” driving and many of the driving patterns that have emerged post-COVID. For example: blocking the box is (unfortunately) somewhat normal, while running through red lights and making illegal turns has (anecdotally) increased significantly.
Traffic safety engineers do not agree with all of those things. don't be an agressive driver even if everyone else is.
Could we verify this against data? Surely if people are trying way worse post covid, that would show up compared to pre covid data by way of accident, fatality, and ticket issuances, e.g.?
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.
Those who are autopsied due to traffic deaths clearly show a massive amount of THC impairment.
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.
> I was guessing it was any amount of positivity, and may be close to the population level, but it's actually impairment levels of THC:
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 think it's lawlessness overall. For instance, consider San Fransisco traffic citations. Went from around 11k in 2014-2015 steadily down and then fell off a cliff during covid but never recovered (around 1k in 2023).
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Michael_Brown
I think it’s underappreciated the degree to which police and LEO have started behaving like political actors. NYC cops decided to “strike on the job” when the city started changing its stance in the mid-2010s, and in the Bay the cops responded similarly to Prop 47 by effectively not prosecuting shoplifting and other minor crimes anymore. Similarly, the recall of Pamela Price started almost the moment she took office and was accompanied by a work slowdown by the OPD in the interest of making the crime situation look worse. There’s other examples, but effectively the police have turned lax enforcement into a tool to preclude any shifts in policing policies. I’ve got my own feelings about those policies, but when you’ve got the cops acting like a political block that gets to set policies instead of a group of city employees tasked with enforcing them, I think that should concern the rest of us.
There's probably some of this, but I think it's driven by district attorney not prosecuting people. We see people that have 20+ prior arrests. How many times can a cop arrest the same person and do the paperwork if he's not going to be prosecuted? I don't think people are pushing police to arrest more people.
> 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.
https://archive.is/VCKkk#selection-473.0-473.379
> There's probably some of this, but I think it's driven by district attorney not prosecuting people. We see people that have 20+ prior arrests. How many times can a cop arrest the same person and do the paperwork if he's not going to be prosecuted?
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.
> 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.
I think you misread? That sentence isn’t describing the criminals, it’s describing the victims.
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.
Yeah, I always wonder why we can't have an "n strikes and you get the electric chair" type of law, where n can be decided. Clearly at that point that person is better off not alive.
That’s a hell of a take for shoplifting.
Yeah I definitely want the person who costs Wal-mart a couple thousand bucks to face execution. great idea.
It's not entirely new! In 1975 during labor negotiations the police detonated a bomb on the mayor's yard, partially damaging the front door, and left a note saying "Don't threaten us":
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.
I do believe you’re mixing up Michael Brown in Missouri who robbed a gas station and assaulted a cop and attempted to steal his pistol (per your own link) with Eric Garner in New York who was choked out by a police officer and subsequently died.
Yes, I am. Updated. Thank you
https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/to-reduce-racial-ineq...
Are there any stats for incorrect crime reporting based on political leaning?
It's the same everywhere. It seems like police have just stopped enforcing traffic laws. Multiple times per week someone runs the red light in front of my local police station, in full view of an officer in their car, and nothing ever happens. Same with the multiple near-misses I see every week. They don't care, and since there are no consequences, there are no longer any traffic laws. Couple that with the mass psychosis afflicting the US, nobody seems to care about anything and just drive as fast and hard as they want to, and fuck absolutely everyone else.
The numbers do appear quite staggering. It can't just be the dead drivers - there must be similar numbers of stoned drivers who are causing accidents, maybe killing others, while surviving themselves.
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.
The running red lights thing is crazy. I think at it's height, I would maybe see 3 people do this in a single 20 minute drive.
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.
I was tboned by someone that swore their light was green. I had a dedicated turn. Thank goodness for cameras.
The trend I’ve noticed this year is turning right from the middle lane cutting off people in the turn lane.
Are they cutting them off, though? If the street you're turning onto has two lanes, it shouldn't be a problem for two cars to turn at once. The car on the inside is required to turn into the nearest lane (according to any state law I know), so why can't the car on its left turn into its own lane?
> Are they cutting them off, though?
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...
"cutting of a legal right-into-any-lane from the rightmost lane"
"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.
You’re not allowed to double right turn unless it’s explicitly marked, at least in the US.
If the right lane goes straight, you can't turn right from any other lane.
Obviously. But the comment said TURN LANE.
If you're in San Francisco, the city essentially stopped issuing traffic tickets when COVID started. It's no wonder lawlessness increased. https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/xMUFt/mobile.png
Traffic fatalities increased during the pandemic[1]. AAA released a study examining the effects in 2024[2].
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10149345/ [2]: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2024/08/the-pandemics-tenacious-gri...
We've seen the same uptick in reckless driving in CO since Covid. Reddit Denver complains about it all the time. I think it's happening everywhere, and it's not clear why.
One of the lesser known dictatorship plays: the ostensible increase of police presence with a proportionate and perceptible increase in crime lead the public and local governance to embrace harsher rule of law and violations of their rights under the auspices therin.
Cause there are fewer police watching and there are no consequences for these people's actions.
The most galling and pervasive offense, though, is TEXTING. The rampant texting while driving is killing pedestrians (and other drivers), leading to oft-cited statistics about the failure of "Vision Zero" and the increase in pedestrian deaths. Not to mention the millions of hours stolen from us all by people BLOCKING TRAFFIC while texting.
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.
Yeah. Well on one side, sharing location on Whatsapp has reduced by 90% the need to text while driving.
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.
Before this year I had only seen 1 wrong way driver in 30 years. In the last year alone I've seen 6! I saw one person going the wrong direction in a round-about. Another person going over the inner portion of a round-about. People stopping in the road for no reason. It's insane. The strange driving patterns is indeed a major issue. I thought it was maybe a Gen Z thing, but often times these people seem to be between 30-50 in age.
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
Come to Fargo. I see it multiple times a year. Usually right after a new semester starts and the farm kids don't know about one ways haha
Its usually drivers license transfers from countries where small bribes can "buy" you a license? https://wise.com/us/blog/transfer-international-driver-licen...
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.
I'm mostly talking about white college students, though I can think of one instance of a Nepali colleague's grandma hitting sometime in our parking lot and almost hitting my car in another incident.
I'm not talking about one-ways, those are confusing in general. I'm talking about clearly marked off-ramps from freeways. In one situation the person had to drive over a fairly large bump in the median just to enter the wrong side of the freeway; again many signs to prevent such a thing and they still ended up in that predicament. Sometimes miles down the freeway before a cop pulls them over. It's terrifying.
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?!
Oh. That's completely different and frightening whereas what I see isn't too dangerous and is more comical
> Since COVID ...
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.
It is crucial to consider correlated variables in their correct context. This finding does not even imply impairment.
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.
reading the paper, I’d say this is a case of hoofbeats meaning horses- people are just getting high and crashing.. Although, this seems like a case where the average is very vulnerable to a ‘spiders georg’ type distortion, especially because of the tolerances people build.
> "average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Wow, this is amazing, you managed to read a paper that is not published? Impressive!
An issue with having the legal limit at ~2-5ng/ml is that it makes habitual users be over the limit if they have smoked recently or not.[0] Making the prohibition seem unserious to some, not about safety but about punitive control, and in turn making it matter less if you smoke and drive as you are taking the risk of getting into trouble in any case.
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...
There was a larger discussion in a previous thread on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730
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...
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31106494/
> 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
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.
Sure, but in this study 40% of people had very high THC concentrations. Is it even remotely plausible this is the baseline population level?
DEAD people
But the truth is that habitual users are always impaired. Source: former habitual user.
I’ve never been a smoker, but I’ve known a lot of friends who went through periods of smoking multiple times per week or even daily for periods of time.
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.
Got any real sources? I've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.
It depends on the level of your habitual use. A 5mg gummy every evening is probably fine.
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've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.
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.
That's not quite the same though. The claim is that because I'm a habitual user, I'm always impaired. Which amounts to over 100k miles of impaired driving over the last decade.
Being freshly high is probably 2 quick beers, I'd think I was baseline after maybe 45 minutes. A massive edible might be 5, and I'd take like 3 hours I'd guess.
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.
If we're doing anecdotes I'm sure there are lots of drunk drivers with spotless records.
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.
Don't we need baseline levels to see the association?
There’s also an association with having drank water and been in a car crash. This on its own can’t reasonably inform any opinions, more context is required.
> There’s also an association with having drank water and been 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.
> 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
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.
Enough with the pedantry please:
"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)".
From https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e536
It is very noticeable to basically everyone when you consume cannabis regularly.
I don't (I find cannabis unpleasant) but I don't think this is at all true.
I think serious studies would be strongly preferred here, as compared to anecdotes or conjecture. I don’t even know if I disagree with your stance, it’s just an absence of data is not convincing.
not exactly. Depends how you consume it. Smoking, yes probably. The other forms of cannabis are less obvious. They are clearer highs without smell or smoke and much less burnout.
Sure, but the problem isn’t whether or not a driver is impaired, but the degree to which they are impaired.
Well, it would be good for the rest of us on the road if people driving two tons of murder box are 0% impaired.
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.
There are some occupations where we aspire to that low level of risk. But it would mean that driving can't be an everyday activity for ordinary people.
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.
That's probably not the thing to tell a parent whose kid just made a dent and a black smudge on a MachE. I don't want to over index on the "think of the kids" argument, but we don't take driving seriously enough. Wikipedia says:
The linked article is astounding. The attitude in this thread is astounding, too. Because driving is ubiquitous and necessary in most of the US, we've become too accepting of the problems. Yes, if you're hitting the vape pen every day you should absolutely not be driving. Jetlagged? Take an Uber. Stroke risk? Give us the keys.Zero degree of impairment is only possible if we don’t have access to 2 tons of murder box. I think the way cars dominate roads and our public spaces and how they are being used is inherently dangerous.
I know this is going to get downvoted by people who cant imagine an alternative but it’s possible all the same.
I borderline want a conscription-style policy, where young adults are required to live in Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, DC, Seattle, or Chicago, car-free for a year. Americans’ inability to even imagine a world where a car isn’t the way to get around is really a problem.
That works the same with alcohol - heavy alcoholic would probably need to be over the limit to feel ok and sober.
An important point is that drug users (alcohol included) lose their ability to judge their own impairment after a lot of habitual use.
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.
Opening the article would have allowed you to see that the average was 30.7 ng/mL, it's in the very first bullet point!
If you calmed down and stopped snapping at everyone, you might understand that I'm writing about how the law and a lack of studies could make some people more willing to drive high. You are substantially diminishing the quality of the discussion here.
The average (presumably arithmetic mean, though it could technically be any of a wide variety of measures) is not particulatly interesting, the median specifically would be more interesting, as a single figure.
using a mean rather than median is fairly odd here. a mean is pretty much worthless without knowing distribution shape.
> 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.
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.
“Finally, no mention is made on the levels of THC in the general population of those driving cars.”
How do you propose gathering that particular data?
One helpful data point is that only about 20% of people over age 12 report any THC use at all in the prior year. Some surveys have even lower numbers, around 1 in 8, but let’s take the highest number for the sake of this comparison.
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.
Came here to say most of this, also worth calling out the note at the bottom:
> 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.
Self driving cars can’t come fast enough to save lives. I’d love to have states start today at cracking down on unsafe drivers of all kinds. I suspect that converting just 10% of miles to self driving + getting rid of 10% most unsafe drivers would reduce fatalities 50%.
Some helpful context: The number of Americans age 12 and older who report using any marijuana product at least once in the past year is around 20% (Source https://apnews.com/article/marijuana-cannabis-alcohol-use-di... ) if I use one of the highest reported use numbers I can find.
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 number of people who report using it is only a rough proxy for the number of people who are using it, though.
Wish the paper were available - would love to know the percentage with alcohol.
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.
Feels like a low sample size, but I'm not statistician or doctor.
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.
Wow, pretty much no one I know drives under any influence regardless what they use.
I wonder how many of these people were under the influence of alcohol and other substances.
There is a very common sentiment among weed users that it doesnt really count as far as driving goes. Stoners will be repulsed and outraged by drunk drivers and then think nothing about going for a "blunt ride"
My friend group in college were heavy weed users, and generally all of them drove while high. I remember one saying he enjoyed it because he felt like he was driving a space ship. I asked if he still thought it was safe to drive, given that impression, and he said yes.
I drove high a few times when I was younger and I had to set my cruise control to 25mph to make sure I was going fast enough haha never again. I just use before bed now or occasionally during the day if I know I won't have to drive anywhere.
Even though their sentiment is wrong, I get why they would feel that way. Marginally drunk vs marginally high certainly feel* very different in how they would impact my own ability to drive.
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.).
The number of times I've heard "I'm good" honestly breaks my heart. Only to have people call me "Hermoine" etc (I am a straight cis man). I wonder what's the best way to talk about this
Report to police anonymously and have them stopped might be an option. If you can't convince them the money might.
> Feels like a low sample size
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.)
We don't know that. We don't even know if there's selection bias.
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.
Whenever you think to yourself "People couldnt be that stupid, right?" read this study and plan accordingly.
I am curious what percentge of the general populous test positive for THC. It would give better context to a dead drivers testing positive for THC.
I don't think it is that simple. I would wager $$$ that dead drivers tend to skew younger, mostly young men who think they are great drivers, drive way too fast, pass with little margin, etc. Young people probably skew higher for THC use as well.
Having said that, I think that effect explains only part of the 40%, but can't explain all of it.
> It would give better context to a dead drivers testing positive for THC.
No it wouldn't.
People make those excuses because it's weed, but you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol.
No need to be judgmental about statistics. They are just facts.
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.
It absolutely would. If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect. I find it unlikely 40% of people test positive for THC, but yes, it does matter.
That wouldn't actually mean no effect, you need 40% of people driving to test positive for it to be no effect. It's unlikely the population driving is equivalent to the population at large - for one there's a set of responsible people who won't drive while high. For another weed use isn't randomly distributed through the population but correlated with certain subsets, which probably have a non-average rate of driving just by coincidence.
(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...)
There is a case for the two populations to be quite similar.
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.
> If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect
Can you explain what you mean by this?
The article is not saying 40% of all drivers tested positive, it’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
> It’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
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.
The levels described are actually pretty low. The "legal limit" is so low for THC that anyone who's had THC in the previous days could test positive, even if they aren't "high" at the time of driving. It isn't quite the same as the BAC legal limits for alcohol. And it doesn't account for body weight, tolerance, and other factors that definitely contribute to how a driver reacts no matter how long it's been since they consumed THC.
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.
Yes, it would be useful. When controlling for variables, you normally want to compare against a baseline.
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.
No it wouldn't.
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.
> 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.
Wasn't so much looking for an excuse, so much as more information.
Why did you automatically assume the point of bias?
> you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol
Well of course not, as the two drugs have completely different intoxication side effects.
> “An average level of 30.7 ng/mL generally means those people must have consumed marijuana at some time close to driving. This isn’t about residual use; it’s about recent consumption.”
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.
This reading doesn’t make sense. There’s no way to extrapolate from this to any statement about 40% of the population, and even 40% of the day is a serious misread imo.
I'm replying to a comment suggesting that this data may be close to population levels rather than something different in the autopsy population.
I'm arguing that if the population data looks anything like the autopsy data, it would imply a massive epidemic of THC overuse.
> 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"
My quote from a specialist disagrees with your assertion. Have anything to support your statement?
There is no mention that these drivers were ONLY impaired by weed. But I can’t believe a paper would not look at the confounders. I know quite a few who are not regular smokers but will imbibe after a few beers if it’s being passed around. Also weed is popular with consumers of stimulants. Without knowing the possible confounders, this statistic tells you very little.
Here in New Zealand we’ve just started road-side testing for drug-driving [0]
0. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/581951/first-day-of-road...
One useful point of comparison here would be the percent of the driving population overall who have some THC in their system in the same way as these researchers are measuring it. I wouldn’t guess that 40% of drivers would test positive for recent THC use, but I can’t understand the 40% number here without knowing the percent for the overall population.
The number of people who use any THC at all isn’t even close to 40% thought. The highest survey numbers I found had 20% of people reporting any use, even once, in the past year.
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.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730
My question is, what is the difference in vehicle death mortality since cannabis was legalized in those parts of the country. If it's about the same, it just tells me that cannabis is a very popular drug.
From what I understand, the effect of legalization (or decriminalization) on the amount of cannabis use is not straightforward at all. You'd have to factor that in somehow.
“Unaffected by legalisation” - so at least there’s more proof than outlawing drugs doesn’t work.
The lack of change after legalization of recreational use is interesting. How many deaths related to medical use versus (previously illegal but decriminalized) recreational use?
I don't think the user population changes much whether it's illegal, "medical," or legal.
This stat beggars belief. I think the headline is phrased incorrectly, and the overall stat is misleading. The actual stat is only from dead drivers who were tested for THC.
The unanswered and unaddressed questions here are, how often and why were the THC tests administered? The article says that’s standard for autopsies. But how often are autopsies conducted on deceased drivers? I would be truly surprised if it’s 100%. In fact, I would expect it to happen only in cases where there was some suspicion of intoxication. In which case, this finding isn’t very surprising after all.This feels like we’re missing a dimension or threeve, the one that comes to mind immediately would be whether or not the deceased driver was at fault for the incident.
Yeah, drug use is also influenced by social and economic status, which also influences driving risks. People of lower socioeconomic status drive less safe cars on less safe roads for longer commutes. This is something valid to evaluate with a drug like THC which is detectable long after use. It would be nice to see the distribution of levels detected and not just the average.
> People of lower socioeconomic status drive less safe cars on less safe roads for longer commutes.
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?
The socioeconomics of the situation is why I'm questioning it, not what I think would be best measured.
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.
Is there a full study somewhere? I'd expect them to screen for other psychoactive substances as well, of which I see no mention here.
No, only conference abstract available.
https://journals.lww.com/journalacs/fulltext/2025/11001/trau...
And what share of the remaining 60% were killed by the initial 40%?
And likewise, what share of that 40% were killed by the other 60%? Fault was not evaluated here.
I’m not surprised so many deceased drivers were under the influence of THC. I see people smoking and vaping at stoplights all the time. I am however, surprised this study claims legalization didn’t change the rate. Anecdotally, on the west coast, I’ve seen far more of this, and also people casually smoking in public spaces (parks or train stations or whatever) since legalization.
Obviously the study is not claiming that rates of THC use in general remain the same.
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.
Are they necessarily smoking and vaping cannabis though? My vape is visually pretty similar to a tobacco vape, and vaping doesn't usually have much odor either way (unless it's scented vape juice, but I'm not terribly worried about cognitive impairment from bubble gum).
That could mean that THC is not causative, just coincidence.
Remember when people in this web site would blame the recent increase in accidents on the supposed cognitive decline from COVID and how hooked we are on our phones because of the evil tech companies.
I live in a "working poor" neighborhood
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
> We can only cure this if we get serious about penalties
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.
> 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 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
Or, at least, not the behavior change you are hoping for.
We have world-leading criminality rates. Given that, the only alternatives are world-leading incarceration, or just letting criminals roam around making law-abiders' lives worse.
Very well said. It worries me how quick people are to leap to “we’ll just imprison people that’ll help” despite endless data that says the opposite
most people who get put in jail/prison for drugs do not get a "taste" of how horrible it is and get years right off the bat for first offense
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
Driving towards a solution of "imprisoning more people" as punishment rather than other punishment have never succeeded. Many states already have first time drug offender and strike programs, people are already imprisoned over a weekend for things even as simple as misdemeanor possession until they can get a bail set. Rehabilitative forms of punishments such as severe fines, community service or mandatory classes and broadcasting them is much more effective in actually driving down rates of impaired drivers.
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.
WA state already has a "three strikes you are out" law (life in prison), but laws like this are racially biased and used against minorities far more.
https://www.courts.wa.gov/subsite/mjc/docs/2024/Three-strike...
Maybe we can declare our intent to eliminate drug use with harsh penalties using a metaphor, like going to war against them. That should do the trick.
> 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
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
It's interesting. You begin by describing the circumstances and then conclude the problem must be fixed by changing individual behaviour.
Could this mean that THC is more dangerous for vehicle safety than alcohol?
With this information alone, no we cannot tell.
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.
Well, its the wrong universe of analysis to make that claim and there is no comparative measure of alcohol exposure in the same universe of analysis so it also fails to provide a basis for any alcohol/THC comparison, so, no?
I bet 100% of them had been drinking water recently.
Cant wait for this tissue-thin abstract to drive weeks and years of anti-cannabis nonsense.
Just noting there’s a difference between THC in your system and THC in your blood. THC leaves the bloodstream after your high. Goes into fat cells and other areas to be broken down and processed (up to a month) later. Having it in the bloodstream after an accident means they were intoxicated at the time according to science. Whether their CB1 receptors were letting it through is another matter. I can smoke a lot of weed and not “feel high” yet I would test off the charts on this test.
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.
It should be the other way around. If there’s no good way to test, then no driving with any THC in blood.
so we're all going to subject ourselves to blood sampling to get behind the wheel?
Maybe just not legalize THC if there is no easy way to test if THC users are intoxicated.
And punish illegal users regardless of intoxication level. Medical users should just abstain from driving while in it.
> I can smoke a lot of weed and not “feel high” yet I would test off the charts on this test.
> 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.
There are individuals that have a high tolerance of alcohol.
Thankfully society didn’t make exceptions. Eventually.
I see THC taking the same, slow, tortured approach.
Sadly, I tend to agree with you.
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.
Right. Taxing could (and should) fund the research needed for better testing.
Also put a stop some of the bad actors and bad behaviors of growers (all night daylight…).
> 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.
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.
On the contrary: we should test for the actual issue (impairment) rather than an arbitrary number.
Blood test is a reliable indicator: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/judicial/resources/highwa...
That link doesn't appear to say that blood tests are reliable
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.
That’s not the relevant bit. A blood test detects recent use of THC.
Which other, less invasive methods cannot. Like alcohol, impairment is highly individual and so we set a threshold.
It is not a reliable indicator of recent use though, since it can also indicate past use.
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.
Driving isn’t a right. No matter how steeped the US is in car culture, it’s important not to lose sight of this.
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.
THC leaves the bloodstream within 24 hours just to be clear.
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.
So you’re advocating that a cop makes a subjective judgement about your impairment level? I don’t see how anyone could find an issue with that.
Then develop more empirical measures of impairment. A device that tests response time, etc. Doctors have been doing that with a hammer to the knee for decades, optometrists do it with a headset that flashes lights where you have to press a clicker, etc. - we have the tools.
They are doing this every day for drunk drivers already.
They also frequently arrest people who have not had any alcohol or drugs at all for being "drunk". It happens far too often.
Just one example of many:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuVdlKD00s
And field sobriety tests are routinely challenged in court because they aren’t objective and at best, they’re taken into consideration with other things like BAC.
my ex-girlfriend challenged this in court last year and lost. She was pulled over coming home and forced to take a field sobriety test. She was angry and was refusing, trying to explain that she just got off work. They arrested her for DUI. Called me to get the vehicle with her crying in the squad car. I bailed her out of jail for $500 two days later. Her BAC was 0.
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.
She needs to hire a lawyer, this happens far too often.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFuVdlKD00s
We hired the best lawyer in town. Spent $20,000.
Field. Sobriety. Tests.
"Say your ABC's backwards starting from Z"
Given that driving isn’t a right, there’s more leeway to be more strict.
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.
Fun fact, you can be arrested for DUI on a bicycle, and it counts the same as if you were driving a car.