If your test is so completely shit its incarcerating innocent people, we should not be doing it. That’s not innocent until proven guilty.
And before you say “well the law says…”, the law is attempting to stop intoxicated drivers. It completely fails at that job because it cannot properly distinguish sober from intoxicated.
Except it does stop intoxicated drivers. And I will say if the law says it’s illegal to drive with X amount of THC metabolites in your blood stream and you are over that limit because you smoked weed, then you shouldn’t be driving. Again: driving is a privilege. If you want to drive then it’s up to you to stay under the limit and it isn’t hard to do. If that means you can’t smoke as much weed as you’d like to that’s too bad.
The fact of the matter is that there simply is no way to reliably test whether someone is actively impaired from cannabis, due to the way THC is metabolised in the body. So we are stuck with the laws as they exist or the alternative is essentially letting people drive while high. How you can find that to be the better choice is honestly baffling to me.
But it doesn’t stop only intoxicated drivers. It gets plenty of false positives and legally endangers safe, sober drivers for something that is no longer effecting them. Claiming it stops intoxicated drivers is like claiming that shooting everyone would kill murderers. Sure, but you’re awfully okay with collateral damage. It’s completely unreasonable to the point of making it illegal to smoke weed if you routinely drive, not just making it illegal to drive while intoxicated.
If you want to drive then it’s up to you to stay under the limit and it isn’t hard to do.
If your limit isn’t about actual intoxication, it is the wrong limit for the job, period. Anything else is blatantly admitting that you’re totally fine imprisoning innocent, responsible people for failing to meet an arbitrary and frankly asinine limit.
The fact of the matter is that there simply is no way to reliably test whether someone is actively impaired from cannabis, due to the way THC is metabolised in the body.
There are ways to test your impairment, which is the thing you actually care about, supposedly. They’re not perfect, but they’re a HELL of a lot better than the bullshit test you’re pitching.
How you can find that to be the better choice is honestly baffling to me.
American principle of innocence until proven guilty. You’re quite happy to punish innocent people with a test that, by your own admission, completely and utterly fails at detection of intoxication and can only report consumption in the semi-recent past. How many innocent lives are you willing to ruin over this? Like, give me an actual percentage. What false conviction rate is acceptable to you? 1%? 10%? 50%?
If the law says you can’t drive with THC metabolites in your blood, and you do so anyway, then you’re not innocent in the sense of the law. And it’s an easy law not to break.
Comparing requiring people who want to drive not to smoke weed all the time (if you’re not a habitual smoker you’re not going to be over the limit unless you smoked recently) with shooting people is so ridiculous it doesn’t even warrant a response.
I don’t find it unreasonable at all to expect people to make a choice between driving and smoking weed habitually. Certainly more reasonable than expecting everyone else to put up with stoned drivers so stoners don’t have to cut back on their habit if they want to drive. And it’s not like I have an issue with stoners. I used to smoke a ton of weed myself. But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with sharing the road with them.
Also, I’m sure we both agree that weed should be legal and I can tell you, as someone from a country that legalised quite recently, that it’s going to be a tough sell if you don’t accept some limitations on driving.
If you have some great idea on how to reliably tell if someone is currently high, then let’s hear it. And it better not be to let the cop who pulled you over decide whether you look stoned or not.
I understand that technically, by the letter of the law, such a driver would be in violation of the law, yes. My point, which I already brought up and that you side stepped, was that the purpose of the law is to prevent intoxicated driving, but its impact is to forbid drivers from smoking too much, even when they do so fully responsibly with regards to their driving. Two people have responded to me since this all began saying there are in fact tests that can detect the proper products and byproducts to make a far more reasonable judgment. The technology exists, then. It’s just a matter of a willingness to use it and pay for it. I’ve also already said they have ways to assess general impairment, which while obviously imperfect for a variety of reasons, at least actually attempt to assess the true factor. You’ve also ignored my question about what a reasonable false positive rate is with this policy. Sure, drivers may cross the threshold, but if we’ve established that the test isn’t a good test of impairment, what portion of totally unimpaired arrests is acceptable to you? How many unimpaired people are you willing to jail to get safety on the roads? You want people you’ve never met and who have not violated the intent of the law to face serious criminal repercussions to give you a sense of security. What portion of the arrests are you willing to allow them to be?
If your test is so completely shit its incarcerating innocent people, we should not be doing it. That’s not innocent until proven guilty.
And before you say “well the law says…”, the law is attempting to stop intoxicated drivers. It completely fails at that job because it cannot properly distinguish sober from intoxicated.
Except it does stop intoxicated drivers. And I will say if the law says it’s illegal to drive with X amount of THC metabolites in your blood stream and you are over that limit because you smoked weed, then you shouldn’t be driving. Again: driving is a privilege. If you want to drive then it’s up to you to stay under the limit and it isn’t hard to do. If that means you can’t smoke as much weed as you’d like to that’s too bad.
The fact of the matter is that there simply is no way to reliably test whether someone is actively impaired from cannabis, due to the way THC is metabolised in the body. So we are stuck with the laws as they exist or the alternative is essentially letting people drive while high. How you can find that to be the better choice is honestly baffling to me.
But it doesn’t stop only intoxicated drivers. It gets plenty of false positives and legally endangers safe, sober drivers for something that is no longer effecting them. Claiming it stops intoxicated drivers is like claiming that shooting everyone would kill murderers. Sure, but you’re awfully okay with collateral damage. It’s completely unreasonable to the point of making it illegal to smoke weed if you routinely drive, not just making it illegal to drive while intoxicated.
If your limit isn’t about actual intoxication, it is the wrong limit for the job, period. Anything else is blatantly admitting that you’re totally fine imprisoning innocent, responsible people for failing to meet an arbitrary and frankly asinine limit.
There are ways to test your impairment, which is the thing you actually care about, supposedly. They’re not perfect, but they’re a HELL of a lot better than the bullshit test you’re pitching.
American principle of innocence until proven guilty. You’re quite happy to punish innocent people with a test that, by your own admission, completely and utterly fails at detection of intoxication and can only report consumption in the semi-recent past. How many innocent lives are you willing to ruin over this? Like, give me an actual percentage. What false conviction rate is acceptable to you? 1%? 10%? 50%?
If the law says you can’t drive with THC metabolites in your blood, and you do so anyway, then you’re not innocent in the sense of the law. And it’s an easy law not to break.
Comparing requiring people who want to drive not to smoke weed all the time (if you’re not a habitual smoker you’re not going to be over the limit unless you smoked recently) with shooting people is so ridiculous it doesn’t even warrant a response.
I don’t find it unreasonable at all to expect people to make a choice between driving and smoking weed habitually. Certainly more reasonable than expecting everyone else to put up with stoned drivers so stoners don’t have to cut back on their habit if they want to drive. And it’s not like I have an issue with stoners. I used to smoke a ton of weed myself. But that doesn’t mean I’m okay with sharing the road with them.
Also, I’m sure we both agree that weed should be legal and I can tell you, as someone from a country that legalised quite recently, that it’s going to be a tough sell if you don’t accept some limitations on driving.
If you have some great idea on how to reliably tell if someone is currently high, then let’s hear it. And it better not be to let the cop who pulled you over decide whether you look stoned or not.
I understand that technically, by the letter of the law, such a driver would be in violation of the law, yes. My point, which I already brought up and that you side stepped, was that the purpose of the law is to prevent intoxicated driving, but its impact is to forbid drivers from smoking too much, even when they do so fully responsibly with regards to their driving. Two people have responded to me since this all began saying there are in fact tests that can detect the proper products and byproducts to make a far more reasonable judgment. The technology exists, then. It’s just a matter of a willingness to use it and pay for it. I’ve also already said they have ways to assess general impairment, which while obviously imperfect for a variety of reasons, at least actually attempt to assess the true factor. You’ve also ignored my question about what a reasonable false positive rate is with this policy. Sure, drivers may cross the threshold, but if we’ve established that the test isn’t a good test of impairment, what portion of totally unimpaired arrests is acceptable to you? How many unimpaired people are you willing to jail to get safety on the roads? You want people you’ve never met and who have not violated the intent of the law to face serious criminal repercussions to give you a sense of security. What portion of the arrests are you willing to allow them to be?
It seems there are methods out there that can better estimate impairment, for example comparing the THC to THCOOH ratio. I don’t know how widespread those tests are though; it would certainly cost more to measure both. Here is an abstract I found: Estimating Time of Last Oral Ingestion of Cannabis From Plasma THC and THCCOOH Concentrations
I’d be totally fine with judging based of a test that actually tests impairment, so if they’d like to use that, I’d be fine with it.