All together now: No intoxication test? No legal pot!

[jmowreader]

I'm not quite as big an advocate for legalizing pot as some of you are--I've never smoked, probably never will smoke. It might be fun, but there are other kinds of fun. This, however, doesn't mean I don't think pot should be legalized.

Right now? No way. As it stands, the only test we have for pot detects THC metabolites, and not THC intoxication. If we had legal pot and didn't have an intoxication test, every time the Texarkana city council starts running low on funds they can just send Sheriff Justice out to bust people who are driving while stoned; all he'll need to do is pull over anyone whose hair is below the tops of his ears and have that person pee in a cup.

[Wilms]

1. What does the Texarkana City Council usually do when funds are low?

:shrug:

[jmowreader]

38. Same thing every other city council does when it starts running low on funds

It sends the cops out to start writing tickets like crazy. I chose Texarkana because it's home to one of America's favorite lawmen, Sheriff Buford T. Justice.


What we have here is a complete lack of respect for the law.

[dbonds]

2. There is a foolproof test to see if someone is stoned.

Set a can of pringles in front of them, if they can resist they are not stoned.

[jmowreader]

40. Sorry, that won't work

My wife doesn't smoke, but she'd fail that test. Loves junk food.

[tritsofme]

3. I've read before that Australian police have devices that measure cannabis intoxication.

It was several years ago, but I do believe such a device exists.

[canetoad]

14. They have a test

but I don't believe it measures intoxication. I think it indicated whether a person has ingested cannabis within X number of hours.

[nebenaube]

4. who cares?

Millions of people have been driving stoned for years... The number one cause of single vehicle accidents is alcohol, the number two cause of single vehicle accidents is sleep deprivation. The number three cause is distraction, cell phones, make-up and eating... Show me data!

[dysfunctional press]

7. just about every time i drive, i'm stoned.

the last thing i grab on my way out the door is my pipe. EVERY TIME i drive somewhere. and i drive every day. and i've never been involved in an accident that was my fault at all.
yes- i have gotten tickets, and yes i have been stopped by cops- but NONE of them ever suspected me of having been smoking weed.

the dude abides. :hippie:

[madeline_con]

13. You remind me of someone I knew years ago.

No matter where whe was going, she had to do a few bong hits first. :smoke:

[dysfunctional press]

33. sounds like my kind of woman.

:hippie:

[hootinholler]

43. No damnit! I want her! n/t

[malta blue]

34. you sound like me....

:thumbsup:

[snooper2]

49. You and I alike :)

When we go riding our bikes ( motorcycles ) we usually ride for about 30 minutes, find a nice spot by a lake to toke for a bit, ride some more :) Good times :)

I really should wash the console out in my truck though :)

[Warpy]

5. Any intoxication can be tested by a field sobriety test

Nobody who is heavily stoned is going to be able to count backwards from 100 by 7s. They're going to keep giggling. The video recording in the cop car will confirm whether or not it's a good bust.

FWIW, any driver who is driving erratically should be taken off the road, even if it's only from fatigue.

[dysfunctional press]

6. "Nobody who is heavily stoned is going to be able to count backwards from 100 by 7s"

umm...i couldn't do that stone cold sober. i doubt that most people could without stopping to think along the way. what kind of a test is that? :shrug:

[ContinentalOp]

8. That's not even the test.

The test is to see if you try. A sober person will do the alphabet backwards very slowly or give up and admit they can't do it. A drunk will attempt to cover for their drunkenness and do it quickly, inaccurately and with far too much confidence. At least that's how I understand it.

[Warpy]

30. It's a pretty common cognitive functioning test

and surprisingly enough, most folks can do it with some thinking and finger counting.

[notesdev]

9. Say what?

I couldn't achieve a level of intoxication that would make it impossible for me to perform such a trivial task.

But then again, I have the very rare quality of being mathematically literate.

[EOTE]

51. Not that you couldn't, but you probably wouldn't.

I have a mathematical mind as well, but I'm sure if I started pounding down the whiskey, eventually I'd get to the point where I couldn't form a coherent sentence, much less do anything pertaining to numbers. Keep it up, and even living becomes a difficult task. No one is completely immune to the effects of intoxicants.

[redqueen]

45. "even if it's only from fatigue"

:thumbsup:

[Indenturedebtor]

10. Ok how bout this - Tax pot stop the drug war and...

Buy public tranportation. Problem solved. :D

[Rex]

11. All drugs can be abused, people have to be responsible

easy to get drugs with no limits? Bad idea. Just ask Rush when he downs billions of painkillers.

[iamthebandfanman]

12. i dunno y the same field sobriety test isnt sufficient?

i mean, its designed to test someones ability to operate a car...
youd think itd be accurate for any intoxicant...

i guess we should have a test for any drug tho eh ?

what about sleeping pills?
or a legit use of pain medication?

maybe allergy medications too?

[jmowreader]

37. Non-chemical field sobriety tests aren't admissible as sole evidence in court

If a cop brings you in on suspicion of DWI, they HAVE to do a chemical test--blood, breath, urine, whatever. (For incidents involving commercial motor vehicles, they must do TWO tests, spaced at least fifteen minutes apart, and the second test must be run on a machine that's on a list of approved testing devices. Nothing says they can't use the same machine for both tests, but the second's got to be on an approved unit.) Assume they will apply the same standard to pot, because this country contains lawyers who enjoy eating and living indoors and said lawyers will demand chemical testing. Without some sort of a test that can mechanically determine intoxication, what are we left with? The same fucking test we're stuck with now--the one that will tell the cop you smoked weed within the last 10 days, but not WHEN within those days. Smoke a bong at Jennifer's housewarming party on Friday, get pulled over for hitting a curb on Wednesday and get tested..."Joe Jones was arrested for driving under the influence of marijuana." (And right now the pot smokers here are thinking, "I'd save a LOT of money if there was weed I could smoke on Friday and still be high from on Wednesday...")

[Fumesucker]

15. And of course, that never happens now, eh?

It's illegal to drive under the influence right now, I find it hard to believe that you are not aware of this fact.

And it just so happens it's considerably easier to catch drunks than stoners due to the different effects of the two drugs.

[armyowalgreens]

16. You bring up a good point...

Because we cannot simply convict someone for being impaired. Maybe they are impaired because they are suffering from a mild stroke.

Who knows.

We need to be able to pinpoint what is causing the impairment in order to be able to decide whether or not they broke the law.


Right now, I don't know of a test that can measure THC levels.

As a pot smoker myself, I wouldn't want to get pulled over, for some reason fail the field sobriety test, and then get pinned with a DUI for pot that I smoked a week ago. That would suck.

[Fumesucker]

17. That can and does happen right now..

So the point isn't really all that great..

[armyowalgreens]

18. No it's still a good point. It just means we currently function in a fucked up system.

[Fumesucker]

19. How does the point effect whether pot should be legalized or not?

You have the same problem whether pot is legal or illegal.

That is why I don't think it's a particularly good point.

[armyowalgreens]

20. "Sir have you smoked marijuana in the last several hours?"

"No, I smoked a bowl about 48 hours ago."

"I see. I'm placing you under arrest for suspicion of DUI"


I would be willing to bet the number of conversations that look like that would increase greatly after pot is legalized. It's not necessarily about the legality of it. It's about the mentality that cops will have once pot is legalized.

[Fumesucker]

22. They have the exact same mentality or worse now..

Do you really think that sort of conversation doesn't take place today?

[armyowalgreens]

23. I've done a field sobriety test and they never asked me about pot.

I have a feeling that would change. And my honest answer of "I smoked pot within the last day or two" would get be convicted of DUI.

Not to mention, they would have to completely rework the sobriety test. I would pass that pretty easily as long as I wasn't super high. Which I rarely am.



I mean, I could be wrong. But I think it still presents a problem that needs to be fixed.

[SOS]

32. RE: smoking a couple of days ago

This problem has been addressed in Germany:

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court, the highest court in the land, has ruled that tiny traces of THC in a driver's bloodstream are not sufficient to convict him of driving while intoxicated and punish him by revoking his driver's license, the German news web site Tagesschau reported. Until the ruling, any trace of illegal drugs in one's system would have been sufficient for a conviction. The January 13 ruling overturned a lower court ruling in Karlsruhe.

In that case, an unnamed Karlsruhe man was convicted of driving under the influence after having smoked hashish the previously night -- 16 hours before he was arrested. Police tested and arrested him after he came to a police station on an unrelated matter. The test showed he had less than 0.5 nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood in his system. But the German high court held because advances in drug testing technology allowed the most minuscule traces to drugs to be detected, German courts must reinterpret what constitutes drug driving. It suggested a level of 1.0 nanograms of THC may be a reasonable cut-off point.

[jmowreader]

39. Because without the intoxication test, pot won't truly be legal

It takes a variable length of time for pot to clear your system--the variables include your percentage of the body fat THC is stored in, how often you partake, how much you smoke when you smoke, the quality of the weed you get...lots of things. Casual smokers should be clear after 10 days.

If you can survive without driving for ten days, you live really close to work and shopping or you've got a moped. And right now, the number of jobs that don't test is pretty damn low...and they're not all that great. I've seen employers demand both preemployment and random drug testing for people whose job will be to clean out foreclosures. That's a job you could do with a lit joint in your mouth, and considering that the purpose of the job is to throw away the remnants of someone's life it's a job you'd probably WANT to be stoned to do--you couldn't feel their pain so badly that way.

If a smoker can't drive or work, he can't really smoke now can he? If you can't smoke because you'd show up hot on a piss test a week afterward if you did, does it matter if a law says it's okay to smoke?

[pipoman]

21. Right or wrong

I believe this does play into the opposition to pot legalization and even decriminalization. I also find it hard to believe that our scientific community are unable to measure intoxication or determine how long ago the pot was ingested.

[Fumesucker]

31. Unlike alcohol, pot isn't toxic..

So intoxication isn't the correct word.

Impairment testing is not difficult at all and would catch a lot of people who are not fit to drive for reasons other than having a drug in their system. I have a family member who drives a lot but truly has no business behind the wheel of a car, she is far from unintelligent but is one of the worst drivers I've ever had the misfortune to share the road with. She has run into stone walls, ditches, head on into an 18 wheeler and rear ended a school bus among a great many other collisions.

Sleepiness is very impairing and there are a lot of Americans who are chronically sleep deprived, yet we have no way of getting chronically sleep deprived drivers off the road.

[jmowreader]

41. They could, but there's no money in it

There's a huge industry devoted to finding someone who smoked pot six months ago and relieving him of his constitutional rights. As there is no money for pure science anymore, we only get scientific inventions people will pay for. No one will pay for a test that proves someone's not stoned now. They WILL pay for a hair drug test that will prove Mary had a hash brownie a year ago.

[JTFrog]

24. Pot stays in your system too long to judge whether you are stoned at the time. Stupid idea. n/t

[JTFrog]

25. Self-edit. My bad.

Totally misread the last part of that OP.

:blush:

[armyowalgreens]

26. I think he was attempting to point out a fairly popular social stereotype...

It's a well known stereotype that long haired hippies are pot heads.

[JTFrog]

27. That's profiling right? n/t

[armyowalgreens]

28. Uhhh yes. That is profiling. The OP was trying to point to the wrongness of doing that.

At least that's what I got out of it.

[JTFrog]

29. Yea, reading it again, maybe you're right.

I disagreed with everything he'd said up to that point and seems in my distraction misunderstood that last part. Rereading it a couple times AFTER my first cup of coffee it made more sense. My bad.

[noamnety]

35. Are you arguing that all drugs should be illegal?

Do police really run tests for every kind of intoxication, including Valium, Tylenol 3, any over the counter drug that says not to operate heavy equipment?

Not a pot smoker here, but that argument isn't holding up for me.

[jmowreader]

42. Not at all. Some drugs that are illegal now shouldn't be

If you were to ask a Libertarian he'd tell you all drugs should be legal--including meth, crack, smack, uppers, downers, allarounders, hillbilly heroin and whatever else they can think of, because as we all know the citizens can take care of themselves better than the government can, right? Everyone here can agree there are drugs that are illegal for good reason. Similarly, most of us here can agree there's not a really good reason to keep pot on that list.

So let's say there was a Cullen-Harrison Act for pot. (Cullen-Harrison is the law that effectively ended Prohibition by declaring that beverages with 3.2% alcohol, or less, were non-intoxicating.) Without an intoxication test, or an impairment test or whatever you want to call an "is he stoned, right now?" test, this law would be an engraved invitation for every cop in the United States to meet his DWI quota by pulling over drivers he thinks look like stoners. He's got too many tattoos, too much hair, a peace symbol on the bumper? She's wearing beads instead of pearls? Pee in this cup!

[noamnety]

44. I'm not sure you caught my point.

There are already a lot of legal drugs that impair driving and the police don't have specific intoxication tests for them all.

Therefore, that is not a valid argument for requiring a specific intoxication test for pot for it to be legal.

[jmowreader]

47. I'm not sure you are catching my point

The American legal system has a lot invested in the illegality of pot. There are whole industries reliant on it--not just for-profit prisons and other custodial institutions, but medical labs, dip-stick makers, advertising agencies, etc., etc., etc. Cops get funding based on the number of Drug Criminals they arrest, and it's less hazardous to bust a pot user than a meth user. I could go on, but you catch my drift--there's money in illegal pot, and they don't want to give it up. Besides, there are a lot of fundamentalists who don't want people to have any non-church-sanctioned fun.

The only way we can turn thousands of busts for simple possession into thousands of busts for driving while high, being high in public and other non-crimes such as that is to have a test that can prove someone's high right now.

[ohheckyeah]

36. I do believe research shows

that being stoned while driving really isn't a huge problem:

Although acute cannabis intoxication following smoking has been shown to mildly impair psychomotor skills, this impairment is seldom severe or long lasting. In closed course and driving simulator studies, marijuana’s acute effects on psychomotor performance include minor impairments in tracking (eye movement control) and reaction time, as well as variation in lateral positioning, headway (drivers under the influence of cannabis tend to follow less closely to the vehicle in front of them), and speed (drivers tend to decrease speed following cannabis inhalation). In general, these variations in driving behavior are noticeably less consistent or pronounced than the impairments exhibited by subjects under the influence of alcohol. Also, unlike subjects impaired by alcohol, individuals under the influence of cannabis tend to be aware of their impairment and try to compensate for it accordingly, either by driving more cautiously or by expressing an unwillingness to drive altogether. http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle_blog/2008/jan/10/the_truth_about_driving_when_you

Here's a fun video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJx0GqR3P_o

[havocmom]

50. I'd rather be in the lane next to a stoner than a cell phone user

The former tends to allow for impairment and not be aggressive. The latter is just an inattentive ego-driven dolt flinging a ton of dangerous weapon around without much awareness of the situation.

[sniffa]

46. All together now.... uh guys? Guys?

[Veruca Salt]

48. Uh yeah there's a test....

it's the 'wave bag of doritos under potential stoners nose' test and works just about every time (though there are a few who don't like doritos so the cheetos are the second test). numnumnum.