andyt andyt:
@Khar. Among my sources I recall a Canadian senate study, the NHTSA, and an insurance bureau, as well as studies from various countries. Is it your assertion that they are all biased and lightweight. None of them said that pot doesn't cause impairment, but that users compensate for it and so may be slightly less likely to cause an accident. The insurance people looked at the data and found that pot smokers in the real world are not statistically likely to cause more accidents than straight people - so that actuaries can set their coverage accordingly.
I didn't read one comment in what I posted that we should just blithely allow people to smoke pot and drive. Just that driving on pot isn't the horror show some people want to make it out to be. If a cop on a roadblock sees some redeyed zonker driving, he can make him do a behavioral test to determine if he's fit to drive. I guess it makes it harder to have a concrete test that can result in severe criminal penalties just for being high, but that's life. People are already driving when stoned. I don't see a huge upturn of people smoking pot when it becomes legal - who are these super law abiding people? And if they are so law abiding, they'll also obey the laws against impaired driving, no?
As I say, I would love to ban everything if I thought prohibition worked. Drugs, including pot and alcohol cause a lot of misery in the world. (OTOH, they also cause a lot of good, allowing people to relax, since we don't teach more natural techniques). But prohibition doesn't seem to work, people still take drugs, and it creates a huge criminal culture. So we've gotta use our heads find what does work best - the least harmful approach. We'll never eliminate all harm from drugs.
Sure, I'll try explaining why I found that to be suspect (both in it's citation and it's creation), and my rationale will follow. Apologies for the length, I wanted to do this justice.
NORML is a cannabis website that cherry picked a single line from the Committee rather than several others available from the study and summary available. The overall summary of the parliamentary report, for example, does include sections that indicate the possibility of what my sources indicate. Also note that they made use of the specific report that happened in 2002, whereas the majority of the sources used in my follow up are significantly more recent. They hence used reports that were already outdated and not in line with general modern research, and which eventually, in the most recent senate report, did not really reflect what that particular website had to say.
Hence, your source in such cases is biased because it is avoiding the majority of the study for the sake of the lines of old papers that match some pre-conclusion they had met. That does unfortunately mean they are skewing the research and hence, while the sub-source is not particularly biased, the choice of source and the cherry picking of phrases from a press release before the study was complete rather than the actual research speaks tons.
Parts of the report did admit to impairment, a lessened ability to drive and so forth, for example. However, I think that we should talk about the content and creation of that report as well.
I remind you that a senate committee is a political body rather than a scientific one, and using them as a basis for valid scientific opinion is not of the same validity of using real, viable studies. Such an example is the use of Dr. John Morgan, a well known pot activist as a leading voice in the argument for allowing pot while driving. Indeed, like the other gentlemen in my last post, he has written books on the topic (with sociologists) and hence has a strong conflict of interest. Indeed, the gentlemen was on the NORML council, the location of your original source and as such a good deal of my criticisms extend to him. The senate made (and often makes) no such distinction.
Of the four scientists present in this discussion, only Morgan was in disagreement. All the three others were in agreement with established scientific fact which has only been built on since. For example, Dr. Kalant stated:
Dr. Morgan referred to some experimental studies this morning. A number of studies, reviewed by Dr. Smiley in the report of the World Health Organization Committee on Health Effects of Cannabis, indicate a fair measure of agreement on what the predominant effects on driving are. The lane control, as Dr. Morgan mentioned, is impaired. The person does not steer as accurately. In addition, there was slower starting time and slower braking time. There was decreased visual search. In other words, when you drive, you must monitor for sources of danger to both sides and not just ahead of you. There was decreased monitoring, decreased recognition of danger signals. The effects were synergistic with those of alcohol. The one favourable thing about cannabis compared with alcohol was that there was less aggressiveness in the cannabis smokers than in the drinkers, so they were less likely to pass dangerously or to speed. Nevertheless, driving ability was impaired not just by weaker, poorer steering control, but also by less alertness to unexpected things that might happen and pose a hazard. Yes, they might be less likely to speed or be less aggressive, but that does not mean that they are safe, as such a comment shows.
Essentially, the opinions of this council were largely undecided, and in both the summary report stated "it CAN do this" but "doesn't necessarily mean this." A lot of information was derived from a man who argued with a large body of evidence so supported by the WHO. The senate body, instead of recognizing this, declared a divergent opinion existed between scientists and moved on, which I found significantly disappointing. I feel this was a case of advocacy science being allowed to get "both sides" of the debate. Indeed, the
Parliamentary Report on Driving concluded there was a significant lack of evidence (in part due to Morgan's statements) and does not account for the decades of research since, which it is possible for us to access. So yes, I do assert that source was questionably used by your source website, skewed, is not of significant scientific merit and lacked scientific rigor, and as is stated in the report, is a Committee making an opinion rather than providing reliable fact. Hopefully this explains my trepidation at accepting that report.
I'm fairly certain both yourself and I would like to avoid any report where Anders, Martin, Oda, and other such parliamentary figures being considered a viable report, and I find it hard not to note a similar deficiency of expertise among the Committee here. Politicians just tend to make lousy third party adjudicators on decisions.
Note too that the sources used indicated that they had discovered a link between accidents, including fatal ones, and various forms of dangerous driving. Regardless of whether or not they believed compensation was happening, a significant level of evidence suggests that they are not able to compensate enough, otherwise we would not see such large deviations from the norm in those papers.
I would prefer that we not move the goalposts in regards to a successful resolution of the topic from "driving while under the influence of pot is not dangerous" to "well, it's not as dangerous as people think" (I am not claiming you are, just that I'd like to avoid that specific position). The unfortunate bit with the latter is a base acceptance that there is a danger to other motorists and a reduced capacity to drive. People are already driving stoned and, as seen, people have died for it. I think the rest of fairly heavy speculation as to whether or not there will be an up-turn, and I would prefer we are cautious and find a way to do a roadside test of significant reliability. I don't want to slow down anything else related to the topic but I do want our roads to be as safe as possible, and I would like to note that this was agreed on by all sources, including the senate one of yours. Find a way to measure whether or not someone is using or reduce it's overall presence on the roads and I'll feel a lot more comfortable with pot being legalized, as I'm fairly ambivalent right now. We'll never eliminate all harms but we should get as close as is societally beneficial and possible. If that is an end to prohibition, fine. If it's through methods that let us track it's use, fine. If it's bodies like MADD getting a lot more airtime to talk about driving stoned, fine. As long as we try to find a way to make things safe, I'll accept legalization, but the problems should be recognized and effort should be taken to reduce the harms of pot while we're at it.
$1:
Not to be argumentative, but again, I do not trust studis that measure for THC metabolites after a crash. They will overestimate the relationship between pot and driving, because the metabolites of THC or lipophilic and stay in the system for days, weeks, even, for heavy useres, months,
I'm also suspicious of meta-analyses, just because I find that the advocacy scientists seem to gravitate towards this approach. No research need be done; just a sttistical analysis of existing studies. And the old saying goes, "torture the data long enough and it will confess to anything."
I don't think pot is harmless, but it's harm is probably overestimated, in my opinion.
In most cases, they used the presence of THC metabolites to simply find out whether or not there was pot involved in the crash, although they did see a general loose correlation between increased THC and reduced ability to drive. One of the studies, for example, indicates it was not possible to measure how high someone was from THC metabolites and that there wasn't a real measurable pattern from a high THC to a low one, but an overall raised chance. Mostly, the aim was to find a level at which any person would be considered impaired.
I have no issues with your remark on meta-analyses, I figured since it had a lot of good sources I'd toss it in. I should have recognized the typical problems thereof and apologize for using it, you're right in the problems such studies tend to have.
I too feel that the impacts of pot are overstated, so I agree with both you and andyt. However, I feel that the evidence that pot can and does have an adverse impact on driving is to the point of significance and must be considered when bringing pot into legality. While there may be societal improvements from such changes, there are also potential societal harms as this. Remedies for these issues must be explored should the legalization of pot be considered the best for society to reduce potential harms to their minimum.
andyt andyt:
Here's a pubmed study that more bears out what I'm saying. (Also the Norml article I posted made reference to a number of pubmed studies, if that is to be the standard.)
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Detrimental effects of cannabis use vary in a dose-related fashion, and are more pronounced with highly automatic driving functions than with more complex tasks that require conscious control, whereas alcohol produces an opposite pattern of impairment. Because of both this and an increased awareness that they are impaired, marijuana smokers tend to compensate effectively while driving by utilizing a variety of behavioral strategies.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19340636And this:
$1:
The potential deleterious effects of marijuana use on driving ability seem to be self-evident; proof of such impairment has been more difficult.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3520605Thanks! PubMed's database is an excellent source for medical information and usually has the most up to date and available articles even for people who don't have full access, so it's one of the more reliable methods out there to get great sources.
Again, I must remark that the latter study you used is rather old and outdated, and hence does not represent the most modern understanding of how it can impact driving. The latter is 1986, and hence has the same problems the senate source has -- a lack of technology and information at the time limited their ability to effectively study the issue in it's entirety, and thankfully we've made large advancements since then. Such technological binds are actually mentioned within the paper.
As for the former, I'm finding it really hard to rectify his discussion with his abstract. Almost immediately into the study, they state immediately that there is impairment and, while criticizing the laboratory tests that got such results as increased weaving, slowed reaction time and so forth, used them as a measure for whether or not crashes are happening and as the basis for his theory that drivers under the influence over compensate. Therefore, I really question where he is going with this study when he is denouncing his own argument (the first, second, seventh and sixth studies I posted don't use lab studies at all iirc). I think the fifth study specifically points out the problems of such studies, so I feel the source you used has a point there, but going back and using that methodology to come to his conclusion seems somewhat hypocritical to me? I dunno. My memory is going a bit, though, it's past 10 here and I've been up for a long time.
I also noted that the measurements he was using for impaired, like 7 mg, meant that other levels at which people were found to be impaired in other studies, with 300 microg/kg THC, were not used at times -- indeed, unless he was discussing people who were around 23 kg, or 50 pounds, he was not dealing with the typical amount described in the papers I used when directly discussing cannabis abuse, and only talked about higher amounts later to talk about variance in how stoned someone was at various levels of THC. Hence, his result is that those who may have THC in their system can drive, and defines them as being high -- essentially, you can drive and tend to be super cautious under the impaired limit, so it may have a trend of making people drive safely when they are under the comparable alcohol limit of BAC 0.02 (as people with 300 micro/kg THC were found to generally be at or above).
I also did not like how he commonly used alcohol as a comparative baseline for success, rather than a healthy person under the influence of no drugs, illicit or otherwise. I also noticed there really wasn't any original research done (this was a meta-analyses, and as Zipperfish noted and I relented with my own source, those have endemic issues) so I'm not sure if you feel the same way about Zipperfish regarding those or not. I definitely recognize his concerns and regret using a meta-analysis of my own.
CKA Uber 
CKA Uber 
