Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by junon 1755 days ago
None of the states I've ever been, over the thousands of times I have partaken, with the maybe hundred different strains, with different percentages of indica/sativa, at different dosages, in different forms (flower vs. edible vs. whatever else), have ever been safe for me to operate a vehicle.

No, nobody is an exception. You are not superhuman.

Please stop normalizing this. This narrative makes it harder to change the minds of dissenters and legitimize legalization for those people that actually benefit from it.

1 comments

Sorry, I don't agree. I don't think cannabis is just a drug for having fun. I'm open to scientific studies that show that car accidents increase but your experience is yours and mine is mine.

The people who have a problem with it aren't going to be able to stop legalization.

You shouldn't do it, I agree.

States with legal weed have seen accident numbers increase. The reasons why are more nuanced than that statement implies.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tanyamohn/2021/06/21/crash-rate...

> I don't think cannabis is just a drug for having fun

Where did I even allude to this? In fact I implied the exact opposite in my last sentence.

Cannabis does and will have medicinal uses. The laws and and the mindset about it are going to vastly change. Delta-8 and all the other numbers are already legal in illegal states.
I never argued the opposite of what you're saying. We agree, I'm not sure what we're debating.
What does "medicinal uses" have to do with the topic of impaired driving? There are all sorts of legal medications that will also impair someone's ability to drive.
The use of THC does not mean you are impaired.
Yeah it does.

Let us just say you are somehow different. That could be possible, and I do not want to question your experience. So great! You are not impaired.

That is simply not helpful or viable from a policy point of view.

When we regulate, we need legal tests and policy applicable to people in a very broad sense, or what we get is a mess that does us no real good.

I have known exceptions to the rule myself. People who can perform having had booze, pot, other drugs.

Always hard to tell whether their baseline, sober capability is exceptional enough to present normally with drugs on board, or their response to the drug is simply different.

Fair? I think so.

And those people can manage their use, function and pass tests too. Cannabis users cannot and that is a problem we have no easy answers to right now.

Sadly, being the exception to the rule really does us all no good when it comes to policy.

Fact is, barring very few people, using THC impairs that user.

Benadryl does the same thing, and in my State people can get a DUI on Benadryl. Sadly, they can also get one being a little too tired and having failed a THC test because they hit a binger last weekend too.

This is all a difficult problem to solve.

It should deffo be off Schedule 1

However, even a full federal legalization would leave us with the testing dilemma I described above. That might be one reason it is still on schedule.

But, say Feds went full legal. Workers comp would still be a big issue because they cannot determine fault, and best case would charge employers accordingly, meaning most would continue their harsh policy, leaving us right where this discussion started.

Opiates, booze, other things flush out and are testable in ways cannabis just is not. And that is a major league policy problem.

If you used enough of it so it actually works, then yes; you are impaired. If you didn't use enough to get impaired, then you wasted your money.