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.
>That's evidence of increased public/open-air consumption, which is to be expected with legalization
>Don't need to hide it anymore, especially if the local police don't have much to do otherwise
Yep. At least in New York City before legalization, using cannabis in public earned you an arrest and a night in jail despite the fact that it wasn't even a misdemeanor, just a local code violation with a $50 fine.
That was done consistently (I know several folks who were caught up in such chicanery) for decades to deter folks from using in public.
But enforcement was spotty and, as usual, melanin content played an outsized role in determining who would be "enforced."
I have DEFINITELY noticed an increase in public usage yeah. Which is strange because that was not legalized in Ohio. Smoking a joint in your car going down the road or at the park is as illegal as it ever was.
I’m sure overall usage numbers are up because I know a lot of people who started using it after they could buy it legally, but those people are all also infrequent users and I’m sure are not driving high. The people who would be deterred by weed being illegal are probably all in the “won’t drive stoned” category. (I’m sure many infrequent users pre-legalization, myself included, were never much worried about the legality but don’t drive high because we like being alive, and we continue to not do so now.)
My fragrant walks around town put me in proximity to neighbors kicking it on their own property, visible and aromatic but not crossing the threshold into what I would consider to be 'public usage'. They're in their garage on folding chairs with the door open, or in the yard, or on a back porch.
In addition to the distinctive smell of marijuana, there is often a recreational fire (wood smoke), and/or a BBQ (sizzling meat). It's publicly visible and apparent, but on private property.
I have never been that social, haven't accepted a pass in decades, don't imbibe myself (despite my internym), and don't recommend it to young folk, but I must be getting a microdose and a minor contact high from the gentle breeze that floats through town more often since legalization.
The study in the post we’re responding to has actual data to show otherwise. The data was collected both before and after legalization (and Ohio is one of the states studied) and did not find a significant increase.
Weed was already easy to get. Any high schooler would have told you it was easier to get than beer BECAUSE it was illegal, nobody had a lucrative license to use for selling it to a minor.
I've never smelled cannabis before in my life and don't know what it's supposed to smell like. I live in an area of the world where it's illegal and I guess not many people are smoking it. I may also have had a quite sheltered education.
This year, I went to British Columbia, and there was this weird scent everywhere that I could not describe. My wife said it was cannabis. I'm still not used to it so I don't know if I'll be able to recognize it next time I travel to North America.
In my experience, weed smells like a skunk. Which makes it really annoying to be around people who smoke, that stuff is really unpleasant to have to smell. Honestly I don't know how people can stand to smoke it with how bad it smells.
I never smelled a skunk, but the first time I smelled this weed smell I immediately loved it and still love it to this day when I occasionally smell it on the street. Even though I don't smoke. I even bought cannabis scent incense few days ago.
I guess perception of this smell, like many others is genetic.
Am I the only one that doesn't find skunk smell not so horrid as it's generally made out to be? It's very strong, yes, but between skunk and asa foetida, it would be hard to choose ;)
I’ve never smoked it or been around anyone smoking it. It’s more of a lower class thing in the U.S.: https://news.gallup.com/poll/642851/cannabis-greatest-among-... (16% of households making under $24k smoke cannibis regularly, versus 5% of households making over $180k/year).
This 100% matches my experience in Washington. I know a lot of upper middle class who use cannabis. I think the consumption of edibles might be higher in the upper middle class vs smoked. But that’s very anecdotal.
Explaining why I never encountered it. Even today usage is quite unevenly distributed. I’m from an affluent, WASPy town in Virginia. By contrast it was common even in the 1990s in the lower class parts of Oregon where my wife grew up.
Interesting. In my experience, the self-described affluent WASP-y types are exactly the kind of people that should probably smoke a joint and chill the fuck out every once in a while, lest they end up as close-minded conservatives.
You’re more likely to find tattoos and marijuana smokers at a Trump rally than in the congressional district where I grew up. It was solidly red when I was growing up, but today is the orderly and industrious wing of the democratic party (Biden +18).
Is that because strong Republican-voting states are such bastions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Last time I checked, places like Texas are using traffic cameras to track down women who get healthcare out of state, bragging about killing people, and posting State Troopers outside of bathrooms.
Or maybe you're talking about Arkansas, where they recently deregulated the employment of children under 16.
Or maybe you meant Florida, which led the nation in banned books for 2025.
Or maybe Tennessee where they allow for the refusal to solemnize gay marriage after the passage of HB 878.
Maybe you're alluding to states like Louisiana and Mississippi, which have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the US.
Seriously, humor me here - what in your opinion has become more "entropic" in VA since they started voting more consistently blue?
Youth these days tend to say “this weed has gas” rather than “this weed is dank”. I’m unsure if that is just due to gassy strains becoming more popular or just lingo. Garlic is another rising scent.
I mean weed really doesn't smell good. If you're not turned off by the smell, it's a learned pleasure. Similar to how nearly every child will dislike the taste of alcohol, yet after drinking for a while they'll learn to tolerate or enjoy it.
It can be a very overpowering smell. When an odor overpowers, it's harder to discern one scent from another.
A few years ago, I moved from San Francisco to a rural area. Smelling weed in SF was not at all unusual. One summer night in the rural area, I smelled it coming through open windows for the first time. I wondered which house it was coming from and how it still smelled so strong after traveling a hundred feet or more. Then I spotted the actual skunk in our yard.
You're always going on about the Netherlands, surely that is based on some experience of being here and if so then you must have smelled weed it is impossible to miss on the streets of any city with more than 100K inhabitants and an active inner city.
It’s very skunky. I thought a skunk had been killed on an industrial road I drive sometimes. The smell was there for months. I finally realized there’s a cannabis processing facility there. Still stinks years later now.
this is surprising to hear - thanks for sharing! i still can’t help but wonder if there are some perceptive differences at play here versus something learned.
Also the amount of people in DC who drive while smoking weed seems very high(no pun intended). Based on the number of cars that can be smelled from another car while in traffic.
Living in proximity to people who don't care enough to not be annoying to others has a few ways you can look at it. But I suggest you consider upgrading the cabin air filter in your car. There are likely options with activated carbon to help reduce odors. This was actually a factor in my decision to go Tesla: their models S and X have an additional massive HEPA filter, and absolutely no outside smells make it into the car.
How does this rule anything out? It is totally possible actual usage of THC didn't increase after legalization. It wasn't one of the hardest things to find when it was illegal.
I think you’re misunderstanding. The paper says that the rates of dead drivers having THC in their system above the threshold did not change significantly after legalization. So legalizing isn’t the culprit, exactly for the reason you cite: people could get it just fine before.
If the population of dead drivers with over the limit THC is 40%, and this dramatically exceeds the population average, that would strongly suggest the THC level IS an indicator of either:
1. Impairment from THC, or
2. Worse than average driving and risk management skills in those who use the drug
Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?
It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.
This is a knowable thing, it just needs to be studied (I'm actually surprised it's not been TBH). Give people a standard set of coordination tests and then draw their blood to see what the THC level is.
If we were just interested in outcomes (in an accident or not), we should just be measuring that. But I guess if we can’t measure that, a litmus test is better than nothing.
The expected number seems to be about 20+% (depending on assumptions) so this is higher than expected but not drastically so.
Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.
I would say that anyone who smokes anything (cigarettes, vapes, cannabis, crack) is indicating that they're at best not health conscious and are acting in a nihilistic way. It seems entirely logical that their risk-tolerance and judgement will be accordingly different to the general population whether they're high or not.
It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.
I can't make sense of it mathematically. A statistical distribution fitting these characteristics does not exist.
If non-weeders have an average seat belt wearing, and if weeders also have an average seat belt wearing, then the proportion of weeders inside of the seat belt non-wearing class is just equal to the proportion of weeders inside the whole population.
How are people not wearing seatbelt? I've never seen a car that doesn't make a constant annoying noise if you're not wearing it while driving. Do they mod the car to disable this safety system? That seems too far stretched...
Older cars don't have these systems. Also they are easy to bypass with a dummy buckle. There are counties where seatbelt usage is far less common than the US.
My parents disabled a couple by pulling a fuse or cutting a wire, but a lot of their use of the vehicles was off road at walking speeds. They wore seat belts on the road.
I read comment as "don't resist our egregious power, our business is to keep becoming more powerful by arguments with different persuasive power".
I have to admit, the car safety argument is among the most persuasive, like do you want to get harmed? But in reality the question is not about "harming and nothing more", the question is about growing the egregious power AND caring about the tax payers simultaneously.
The seat belts comment is so apt. We should be looking at the full population of drivers involved in accidents, not just those that went through a windshield.
Restraints play such a pivotal role in crash safety, but not wearing them isn't a meaningful indicator of impairment status.
The people who don't wear seatbelts are in my observation old folks who grew up without them or before using them was mandatory. It's just their habit.
I've almost never seen a person under about age 40 not using a seatbelt.
No. I don't know a lot of people that don't wear seatbelts, but they all smoke weed. All of my friends that died in car wrecks weren't wearing seat belts and would have definitely tested positive for THC.
I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.
The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.
While I do not commonly ride in cars driven by people outside my family, my experience has been quite the opposite: when I do ride in cars with older people, they buckle up as a matter of course, while when I ride with younger people, they are much more likely not to.
Not necessarily, they could both be a comorbidity of some other factor (bad decision making causes both, for instance) but it certainly doesn’t refute it.
- [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.
I don't understand how this study can make that claim just looking at crash report data. The assumption that not at fault drivers are representative of people who aren't in accidents at all is pretty generous? It seems likely that folks who are unimpaired are also better at avoiding accidents / driving defensively
My preferred way to wade through a political research topic like this is to look at the aviation industry. If a pilot can not use a medical substance, then it is very likely that there is some thing there. Pilots are generally fairly high investment, and they are also fairly international in research and standards. All nations with an airforce tend also be interested in such research, regardless of current political flavor.
"The results support our preliminary study and suggest that very complex human/machine performance can be impaired as long as 24h after smoking a moderate social dose of marijuana, and that the user may be unaware of the drug's influence. "
I think that aviation has a lot
of factors that bias its decisions conservatively. The “cost” of being conservative can be pretty easily borne in aviation. As an example, Zyrtec is grounding for 48 hours after taking. I think most Zyrtec users drive daily and likely quite safely, but aviation can afford to ground pilots at a lower level of risk than probably makes sense for drivers.
(I have very little doubt that THC is impairing; that pilots can’t legally use it is only very loosely related to that likely linkage.)
I think you miss the point of the comment you replied to.
> The law's assumption that this level of THC is evidence of impairment seems to be invalid.
I think most will recognize that THC causes impairment. The question that (AFAIK) is unanswered is if it can be measured simply by looking at the concentration of THC in the blood.
In fact, if you look into the mechanisms for alcohol tolerance vs THC tolerance. What you'll find is that alcohol tolerance is a result of the body developing fast paths for breaking down ethanol. Meaning the same BAC will have the same intoxication level, the body just works harder to keep the BAC down.
THC tolerance, on the other hand, appears to be the THC receptors becoming desensitized to THC. Which means the body doesn't appear to metabolize THC faster as tolerance builds.
That's where a blood test might not be a good indicator of THC impairment.
What the aviation study show is that the impair can continue for a very long time after a single small use. A blood test might be a terrible indicator how how much the impairment is, but the question then is how much tolerance you need in order to have zero impairment under some levels of THC. It also but a bit of doubt that even after 24hrs the impairment can be noticed, long past where the user subjectively feel any effect.
Alcohol tolerance might even be a positive here, since a drinker can drink a glass of beer 24hrs before a flight and be fairly certain that the ethanol has been broken down, regardless of tolerance. If THC metabolize slower as the body builds tolerance, then the impairment may continue for a longer time at a lower intensity even for a small dose, increasing the period of uncertainty.
The question then becomes "what level of impairment is tolerable".
Driving doesn't require perfect cognition, just good enough. If we went for perfect then anyone over 65 would be banned from operating a car.
And I think that's the hard thing with THC. Yes you may be impaired 24 hours later, but how impaired and how does that compare to age related impairment.
I could see that. In Sweden there were recently a buss accident where a health issue with the driver caused them to black out, killing several people and injuring even more. We put a lot of trust in commercial drivers that are responsible for managing people and several tons of moving vehicle. Pilots employed by commercial airlines generally have an age limit at around 65-68.
What level of impairment is tolerable when the buss driver are driving on the highway at highway speeds?
I would expect there to be significant overlap between the demographics of those who more commonly get in accidents and those who use THC. Based on nsc.org, it seems like the majority of car accidents are with drivers 25-34 years old, and occur more frequently late at night on weekends. That generally matches the profile of the stereotypical THC user. It is hard to find good numbers of THC use.
Remember that not all the population drives, nor are accidents randomly distributed in the population.
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.
> 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.
isn't that just common addiction response?
"no, nothing's wrong with me. my drugs aren't the problem - you are the problem"
I think most addicts when not high/drunk/fucked up off their substance of choice would admit that they they are more impaired and not good to drive when they are on their substance of choice.
But you'll still find some small percentage of them claiming they wouldn't be impaired.
Source: have actually spend a lot of time around addicts.
Isn’t it suspicious that no matter what the circumstances, their current decision-making is correct and their past one wasn’t? It seems somewhat self-unaware.
You have to tune down your self-estimate’s value if your self-estimate shows historical poor performance.
Anecdata: There are neurochemical upregulation effects to daily THC use over time, and upon discontinuance that upregulation (which can take months or even years to wear off and perhaps not) is in itself quite apparent.
> 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.
You're only expected to crash 500 or so times per 100 million miles as the base rate[0]. If you were impaired enough to have 2x or 3x the risk of crashing then it's entirely possible that you wouldn't crash, or that other factors would play a larger role.
You probably are compared to your baseline self (another comment goes more extensively on this subject) but maybe you have enough driving skills and common sense to minimize the risks somewhat.
Planning, good sense, and caution go a long way to compensate for physical impairment. Weed is different from booze in that booze increases risk taking, which makes driving such a danger. But that doesn’t mean weed doesn’t impair in some material way compared to baseline.
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.
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 high basically for 15 years straight and was a professional athlete during that time in a sport that requires a lot of coordination. I know many other athletes that are heavy users, the majority of the best athletes I've ever known were actually. So how do you think that works?
I don't trust anyone else on the road because all of you are comically bad drivers compared to someone like me.
> 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?
Wait, how is mayo, vegan or not, related to dairy?
For some reason, people lump eggs in with dairy, presumably because they're unaware of the difference between hens and cows. You'd have to have quite a lot of detectable THC in your system to confuse the two, but here we are, people think that eggs are the same as milk.
To be fair, my milkman delivers eggs as well as milk, cream, and butter, but they come from a totally different farm.
Dairy is a category that depending on context may or may not include eggs. In this case the distinction doesn’t matter. Vegans wouldn’t have experience with strictly defined dairy or eggs.
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.
> 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
"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)".
Source? Source? Got any source about me? Yeah well those statistics only deal with other people who aren’t me, so I guess you’re not really trusting the science :/
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.
But yes, what you say is the logical consequence (except I'm not kidding about grief and impatience).
My point really is that if we want our kids not to get horribly injured or killed, we can't just focus on "other people" making bad decisions like driving drunk. We have to acknowledge that we've collectively built a system that requires people to put each other in danger with cars, and we have to think about how to change that. Cars bring a lot of benefits like autonomy and decentralization, how do we keep that but kill fewer people?
Per 1 billion vehicle-km the US has 6.9 deaths and the Netherlands has 4.7 deaths. That’s obviously better much but I wouldn’t call it “problem solved”.
My guess is better road design means less miles driven by cars (as opposed to other, safer vehicles) and therefore fewer accidents overall, even if car crash statistics remain the same.
The solution is to make the roads safer in general and/or reduce road use, not to take away people's keys for relatively tiny risk factors.
And in particular for the Uber situation, if taking a taxi 10 miles causes 15 miles of taxi-driving, that's less safe than driving 10 miles with a small to medium impairment.
0% impaired? We know tired drivers are impaired. Should we require drivers to demonstrate 8hrs of sleep before operating a vehicle? What about people who do ok on less sleep? I think there are obvious issues with such a proposal and those issues transfer to THC usage. I would bet, if we could measure it, a large portion of fatal accidents would involve people who are not fully rested and had missed the 8hr target multiple times in the preceding week or two
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.
Cars are inherently dangerous, though. They're multi ton hunks of metal moving at high speeds. That's dangerous from literally any angle you can imagine.
There are ways to make it less dangerous, sure. But they're never 100% safe. Which makes them, by definition, inherently dangerous. That's... What those words mean.
So long as you’re also willing to label swimming pools, grapes, and crayons as, by definition, inherently dangerous on account of not being able to be made 100% safe, then I’ll at least grant you a level of consistency in your argument.
Swimming pools are absolutely inherently dangerous. Why do you think lifeguards are a thing?
Like, really man? If you can't even recognize as dangerous the one activity that famously requires someone specifically trained to save people to be present, then I'm happy to end this conversation right here. It's clearly just a waste of time all around. I just hope there's no one in your life depending on you to judge what's safe and what's not.
Comparing "100% safe" vs the danger cars represent is so ridiculous I have to question if you're kidding? We're talking 40,000 people killed every year in the US alone on account of traffic accidents. And you're talking about grapes and crayons?
And swimming pools are pretty dangerous though? There are around 4,500 drowning deaths per year in the US, so on the order of 10x fewer than due to car accidents, but still quite a lot.
GP is the one who argued “not 100% safe” as evidence of inherently unsafe.
I agree with you that it’s a comically wrong threshold, which is why I offered that series that was progressively more safe but never 100% safe as examples against that line of reasoning.
Make the threshold "won't kill you 99.9% of the time, even if you have little to no training at that specific activity" then. Is that specific enough for you to engage meaningfully with the conversation at hand, and show why you think driving is at the same side of this threshold as eating grapes or using crayons?
> Also, my son was just hit by a driver while he was on a bike and in the bike lane.
Let me guess, the painted line on the road did not in fact prevent the vehicle from crossing into the bike lane? What we as a society consider acceptable cycling infrastructure is pathetic.
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.
I partially agree, but it is still relevant, because there is a relatively low upper bound to the values possible after which someone would literally be unable to even walk to their car to start driving.
When the average is SO high above the legal limit, and with this constraint that there is an upper bound, it's absolutely relevant.
This seems like an intentionally misleading title, since they don't mention that the study was for one county (Montgomery County) in Ohio, which is basically just Dayton, OH and surrounding rural area - < 600k people.
I'm sure you can pick other counties in the US which have either very high representation of THC users or very low representations. Without knowing how other counties score in terms of driver fatalities and THC, this is not really very useful.
To me it sounds like an effort to paint THC as big and scary. But in my experience living in a few large cities, weed is rare - but lots of people go out, drink, and drive home one or more times per week.
ScienceDaily goes even further by rounding up to 50% and burying the location halfway down the summarization.
"Nearly half of drivers killed in crashes had THC in their blood
THC-impaired driving deaths are soaring, and legalization hasn’t slowed the trend.
Date:
October 5, 2025
Source:
American College of Surgeons
Summary:
Over 40% of fatal crash victims had THC levels far above legal limits, showing cannabis use before driving remains widespread. The rate didn’t drop after legalization, suggesting policy changes haven’t altered risky habits. Experts warn that the lack of public awareness around marijuana’s dangers behind the wheel is putting lives at risk."
Unless they publish who funded the study, I'm skeptical that the alcohol industry might be involved. It's absolutely in their best interest to paint marijuana as the devil (and take attention away from alcohol).
Obviously nobody should be driving with any impairment, but people do - driving tired, texting, even talking to passengers and turning their heads to look at the passengers while they talk! (Really, why??? I see people doing this all the time.)
To give some statistical context, as of 2023, about 16.11% of people in the US have used cannabis in the past year; per that same dataset, about 16.53% of Ohio residents. [1] Given that Ohio’s usage metrics align closely with the national mean, I think it's fair to use the state as a proxy for broader domestic trends.
Per more Pew Research data, also from 2023, Ohio seems to have an average, if not a less than average, concentration of cannabis dispensaries, compared to other states where CBD products were legal. Montgomery County, OH is located in the bottom-left quarter of Ohio, and sits in a region with lower dispensary density than many comparable U.S. districts. [2]
Given that usage metrics mirror the national mean despite a lower-than-average retail presence, I think this dataset is a pretty fair "middle america" benchmark.
You cannot pick and choose one or two variables and then claim representativeness based on a numerical match. The first step is to identify the confounding variables that are likely to influence the outcome. Only after those are specified a comparison set can be defined and matching or adjustment criteria applied. Without that process, agreement on a small number of aggregate measures does not establish that the underlying populations or mechanisms are comparable.
I'll concede this, however in large-scale demographic data, when the central tendencies of two populations align so closely, it is statistically unlikely that their underlying distributions are radically different. It puts the burden of proof on the idea that Ohio is somehow an outlier, rather than the idea that it's a standard sample. Otherwise, were we to attempt to account for every confounding variable, we would be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Thanks for the data. While it does need more cross referencing it would indicated that deceased drivers are more than twice as likely to have traces of THC. We need to eliminate non-drivers but I think the proportion of drivers with traces of THC will remain higher with drivers than in the overall population.
Next, same stat for alcohol, that would be interesting.
Maybe adapt the THC threshold a bit to really only count people who recently consumed THC.
You sound like the people who were outraged when drinking and driving was first banned. They had all sorts of made up logic to get around wanting to consistently being a hazard to others.
I’ve applied this same rule when reading news or watching tv - if your immediate reaction is shock, surprise, or anger, think of a list of organisations who would monetarily benefit [1] from that article or show etc.
Nobody does a news story for the fun of it unless it genuinely IS news, but it’s been shown [2] that over 70% is PR pieces trying to make you think one way or another.
[1] money talks, and bullshit walks
[2] Australia’s Media Watch ran a piece about this a few years ago
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 biggest problem with drawing conclusions from the 40% number is that THC use correlates with other well established crash death risks like being a young driver or the use of other impairing substances.
The fact that legalization did not impact the crash rates is also a strong signal that THC itself is not causing the crashes.
The presence of THC in the blood is not a reliable signal for intoxication, so further research is needed to draw any type of conclusion.
Finally, it's also been noted that there are some sample bias concerns because the data comes from fatal crashes where it was determined that a drug test should be administered after the crash.
> 40% having significant THC in their blood is a stunning statistic no matter how you look at it.
Yes, it is a stunning statistic.
So much so, that in itself it makes it worth questioning the results of this study.
If 40% of fatal crash victims had THC in their bloodstream, and only 20% of the general population did, that would imply a 100% increase in chances of dying in a car crash from having smoked marijuana. That's an absolutely massive risk factor, the kind you would expect to show up very, very clearly in any kind of statistical analysis of car crashes.
But the other thing I've seen a bunch of people cite in this discussion is that there has been no statistically significant increase in fatal crashes following marijuana legalization.
That would imply that either there was no statistically significant increase in drivers high on marijuana since legalization, or there was no statistically significant increase in the likelihood of causing a fatal crash from being high on marijuana.
Based on our knowledge of human nature, the former seems incredibly unlikely (yes, there would surely be some people who would have been smoking pot before who just stopped hiding it as much, but there would also, just as surely, be many people who had been interested in getting high before, but who had been intimidated by its legal status or had no idea how to find a dealer until there were dispensaries opening in every town).
The latter directly contradicts the implication of this study—but this is only one study, and may have methodological issues that we are unaware of.
What percentage of people who drive drunk have consumed thc within the time window of blood detection?
Now this is a more reasonable number
I really don't know why this number is significant. Accidents are situational and people who engage in situations where accidents are more frequent likely make other decisions about consumption and lifestyle which involve things like cannabis
Who cares?
You aren't going to elevate the behavior of the population by regulating a plant
Yes, very rough. Marijuana still being illegal at the federal level, and often illegal at the state level, means it's not always in your best interest to self-report.
For example, in my doctor's questionnaires. "Have you used illegal drugs in the last year?" I'm always going to say no. I don't trust security and privacy enough to say otherwise.
And yes, for HN scrapers, I'll mention this is all hypothetical.
Not sure how much it differs from the US, but in Australia disclosing previous drug use is unlikely to provoke any response from authorities. The main drug crimes are possession and selling AFAIK, not using.
You can't drive at 12 though surely? And you have to account for the fact that young people are going to be more likely to die in crashes and more likely to use weed.
This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.
>This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.
Given that differing levels of THC impact people differently both because of potential "tolerance" in frequent users as compared with occasional users andindividual responses to cannabis (and even different cannabis strains with varied chemical profiles). There may well be other confounding factors as well.
Cannabis does not affect everyone the same way. It doesn't even affect the same people in the same way every time.
As such, while the testing you suggest may well be useful over the long term, it will require large populations and repeated testing at varying levels of both subjective intoxication and THC levels in the blood over extended periods to get good data about how THC use (both in temporal proximity and overall usage patterns) causes impairment.
As anecdata, I can absolutely say that lower levels of THC consumption results in much more impairment if cannabis hasn't been used recently and higher levels result in less impairment if there has been recent use.
That's not to say that driving (or any high-risk activity) is appropriate while actually high. It is not. Driving while impaired (by anything) is a terrible idea.
I'm not a statistician but when I know when I've only gotten 250 users through a split test it's not even worth looking at the results. So just for you I'm going to say 10,000 and geographically spread from more than one county in Ohio which contains a University.
> 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.
>focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC following a fatal crash”. That means there could be selection bias at play.
that wording definitely sets off warning alarms for selection bias. but it looks like there were approximately 350 traffic deaths in montgomery county during that period [1]. that probably about lines up with 246 drivers dying during that period, so it seems likely they tested all or almost all deceased drivers.
They failed to present the average _age_ of the drivers as well. Young drivers are more often involved in fatalities than older drivers. This is clear if you look at the NHTSA's FARS database.
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.
I think there is definable a connection between cannabis use and auto accidents. It slows your reaction time and that’s a known factor with accidents. That said, substance use data is notoriously underreported[1] in surveys. So that 20% data point is not very helpful. Also 12-15 year olds are bringing that number down in your data and also can’t drive making it even less useful for comparison.
And substance use impairment is overreported. If the driver was impaired it's counted even if the impairment has no bearing on the accident. A drunk hits a red light runner--it's called alcohol even if he had no hope of avoiding it.
My understanding of stoned drivers is they tend to be too conservative--waiting for the stop sign to turn green etc. If that's accurate it could also mean stoned drivers are worse at avoiding the mistakes of others.
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.
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.
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.
Jail time should also be considered too, for repeat offenders.
Cars are a weird sort of thing, where they both are the justification for a surveillance state and lots of monitoring, but we also have extremely lenient penalties. It's difficult for me to understand how the US arrived at our current set of laws.
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.
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.
Yes, it works. The state that I used to reside in has draconian DUI/Traffic laws, and not coincidentally low traffic death rates.
Driving with license revoked or suspended was a serious charge and resulted in impound of vehicle and mandatory jail time. Repeat offenders would have their vehicles seized.
DUI laws similarly brutal. 2nd time offenders faced potentially life-altering charges and penalties. Get into an accident with injury to another person while DUI? Huge jail time. Felony DUI results in permanent loss of driving privileges.
Speeding 20 over the limit? Enjoy your reckless driving charge which is as serious a dui charge.
I read that getting a license back after a 2nd dui carries and average cost of $50k. Getting 2 dui's within 10 years automatically bumped 2nd dui to felony....no more driving for you.
Lax driving laws and penalties do nothing more than get a lot of people killed.
I mean to your point, when someone is robbing a 7/11, in today's atmosphere, no - no they don't consider it because the punishment is fairly low. In Islamic countries, if you steal you will likely lose your hand (or your head). In those countries people REALLY do consider the consequences.
Now I'm not advocating for the second option there. Just something in between. (obviously a lot farther away than the second option).
If my choice is jail or relocate and find a new job and home in a city with passable public transit (even if its just the bus) I know which one I'd pick.
The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.
If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.
> If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.
> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.
I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).
Alcohol will likely always be a factor in the worst accidents. But France is doing something right because your fatal accident rate per capita is one third that of America's [0].
It's not France in particular though, America is the outlier among developed nations. In fact France is a bit behind most other European nations (but not by much).
How much of a deterrent can the police possibly impose that would outweigh the deterrent for not driving illegally, which (in your country) is being starving and homeless?
The cops will never deter everyone from breaking the law, but they don't have to. They just need to deter a large enough % of the population to have a positive effect.
Driving while intoxicated is not a crime of desperation. Even celebrities are often caught for DUI despite being able to afford a full-time limo driver.
Most people who drive intoxicated have jobs and reputations they'd prefer to keep, and families at home they would rather not be separated from or have to explain an arrest to.
And to be clear, we can't solve all the problems with a single measure. I'd like to see not just better law enforcement, but also a social safety net that ensures nobody is ever starving or homeless.
The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
>But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
An anecdote related to me by a former (Florida) county sheriff's deputy answers that question:
Many police will stake out bars around closing time, awaiting the intoxicated to get behind the wheel so they can be stopped, breathalyzed and arrested.
However, patrons were aware of this and the deputy saw a patron leave, stumbling, drop their car keys several times, then get into their car and drive away.
When stopping said individual, the breathalyzer and field sobriety test showed the driver to be stone cold sober. As such, the deputy sent the driver on their way.
Returning to the bar parking lot, he found that all the other patrons had departed while he was wasting his time on the one sober person -- dubbed the "designated decoy."
I'm sure other variations are and have been in use in the US for a long time -- since most places don't have public transportation or reliable taxis.
The "cars first, public transit last, if at all" culture in most of the US makes the likelihood of DUI/DWI and crashes/injuries/fatalities much, much worse.
> The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
And there's a large enough population for whom driving without a license is not a crime of desperation. In many places there _is_ a public transport alternative (even if its slow and crappy). I used to give a lift every day to a colleague who had lost his license. I enjoyed the company and he paid for my gas. Many people can make an arrangement like this.
> But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
Having been in this position many times: take an Uber, then Uber back to get your car the next day and plan better (or don't drink) next time.
>How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
When I was in college in Ohio, one of my suite mates had several DUI arrests. After the first, his license was suspended -- yet he was allowed to drive to/from work/school because public transportation was minimal. After the third DUI, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail -- served on the weekends so he could continue going to school without interruption -- and still drive his car to/from work/school.
I was flabbergasted by that. But I guess that's how things are often handled in places without public transportation. And more's the pity.
Am I? The second paragraph is about how to get around legally if you don't have a license. First and third paragraphs are about not making the bad decisions that you get into that situation in the first place (prevention is better than cure). What am I missing?
This thread is about driving without a license, but from the perspective of enforcing the laws to keep unlicensed drivers (who are generally more dangerous) off the roads to make the community safer. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes its unrealistic to expect 100% of unlicensed drivers to stay off the road (for reasons you have outlined), there is a large enough % of unlicensed drivers for whom visible law enforcement would be a deterrent and that would at least be an improvement over today.
>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.
I’m strongly in favor of exponential punishment with very light punishments for first offences. It allows fluke infractions or bad luck to go without being punished too hard, but severely punish the small anti-social group that brings the rest of society down with it. So maybe if you accidentally run a red light once it is a $10 ticket, but next time it is $100, and then $1000, and then $10000, and then $100000.
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!
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!
Most US states do, too. But people will drive without a license because it’s the only way to get to anywhere in most of the country. And I suspect we’re light on enforcement for the same reason.
"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)
> it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year.
Are you saying you can legally keep driving despite dozens of speed camera tickets in a year, as long as you keep paying the fines?
That's wild.
Around here (Melbourne, Australia), you'd lose your licence very quickly. A single speeding ticket is a minimum of 3 points off your licence (of which you have 12), and bigger infringements lose more points. So at most you could speed 4 times, but probably fewer. And it takes a few years for the points to come back.
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.
France gets around that by assuming it's the car's owner's fault. If you were not driving the car during the infraction, the person driving the car must fill out a form saying he or she did and take the hit voluntarily.
If the car's owner is a company, the company must declare a default conductor for this purpose.
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.
> 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.
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.
Camera tickets are in a weird place legally. They might not be legal, because of the 6th ammendment and due process requirements, so states tread lightly. A light touch gets a lot of compliance and is most likely self-funding; enforcement by humans may be more effective for habitual violators, but you most likely can't have as much coverage and be self-funding.
If you had 30 speeding tickets issued in person, it would be a lot different than 30 speeding tickets issued by machine.
If they're talking about automated speed cameras I guess there's the problem of not being able to correlate the plate of the car with a particular human, a bill simply gets sent to the owner of the car, but maybe if we impounded cars at some point people wouldn't be loaning cars out to their licenseless friends
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.
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.
Ah as long as Brookings Institute tells me it's a myth, I'll ignore the people selling basic toiletries right outside of drug stores, or bike messengers riding with suspicious taped up bikes that are poorly suited for heavy city use, or the videos of people coming in as a group, loading the bags and making off in get-away cars. Ignore what's in front of you, or the fact that nearly a third of shoplifting can be tracked down to ~300 people. These people maybe just have really big families to feed!
But you might ask why are stores closing? Why is deodorant behind lock and key?
> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities.
Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.
The Brookings institute is hardly a lefty rag - they're about as centrist/neoliberal capitalist as an institution comes.
> Ignore what's in front of you
Yes, the general advice is to look past specific notable anecdotes and try to identify actual data to validate whether your emotional experience of the world is reflective of the world or of you. In this case, the numbers suggest the problem is not the world, no matter how many videos you're seeing on TikTok or wherever.
A real problem for assessing truth in the modern world is that anything that happens anywhere is instantly available to you as a decontextualized short-form video, and it's your job as a responsible media consumer to understand that ten videos on your feed are not a trend outside your feed.
> Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.
No, they're not forgoing profits, they're choosing to close stores with lower levels of profits than they'd prefer and using retail theft as an excuse. It wouldn't be the first time and it sure won't be the last time that a business tries to deflect blame for its poor planning onto the rest of us.
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.
I have to deal with the same kind of bugs all day long, doesn't mean I get to refuse to do my job for years at a time until someone I like is voted into office.
Welcome to the reality of the Black Lives Matters protests.
They got what they wanted--fewer Blacks shot by the police. But that's because the police weren't being as aggressive in doing their job. Crime rates went up, the number of Blacks killed went up--fewer by cops being offset by more from other criminals.
And we see the result of bail reform. The old system was not good--for lesser offenses they were typically sentenced to time served. This amounts to skipping over the determining guilt part of "justice". But when they took action on that they didn't notice that that was what was actually keeping them off the streets. The justice system simply does not have remotely the capacity to actually prosecute as many crimes as they catch.
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 that walmart lost something, it's that it's a general menace to others, and if you do it once fine but if you do it 10 times you're out. Get them to leave the country, if execution is not your thing.
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.
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.
Nobody said he did. He said the RIGHT lane was a TURN LANE. Which means the lane to the left of it could count on the people TURNING, not going straight.
WTF, YOU made the comment:
"If the right lane goes straight"
You might as well say, "if the people on the opposite side of the road cross the median..."
Yep. Which is why "If the right lane goes straight" doesn't make sense. We've already established that the right lane does NOT go straight, because it's a turn lane.
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.
There’s no reliable way to determine impairment from a blood test. At most, this says that ~42% of people used it recently and/or frequently enough for metabolites to be present.
Correlation, and about a billion compounding factors.
For example: younger people are more likely to be regular cannabis users - and are also more likely than the general public to get in motor vehicle accidents.
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.
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
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
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?!
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 got a dog during COVID and I'm not sure if this is a related issue but the number of times I've had people not brake but accelerate as we're crossing the street or flash their high beams or try to drive around us at the last moment is insane.
there are days where it happens multiple times during one walk and weeks where it happens at least each day of the week.
i'm actually a car guy but when i drive if i see any pedestrians i always slow down and i take it even easier if i see they have small children or dogs since either can randomly stop or dart away.
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.
If you have ever driven in Ohio the driving behavior is absurdly different than what you see in places like CA. People rarely speed. They willingly let you cut them off. And there are reasons for that too. Here is a map of where you are most likely to get a speeding ticket (1). The only place in california I've seen any enforcement of speeding or traffic behavior is along the 395 corridor in the Owens valley. Incidentally this region comes up in the map. It simply does not happen in LA county at least. Well, maybe they slap a speed ticket onto a pursuit case on top of everything else. But no sit and wait radar taking that I've seen.
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.
Non-scientific anecdote here but I feel like the lawlessness is due to lack of enforcement for traffic violations vs an uptick in weed usage. Possibly covid scrambled our brains and promotes aggressive impulsive behavior. Maybe cops are afraid to pull people over because they might inadvertently shoot them and become a national news story. Maybe the adoption of big trucks makes people feel invincible (two distinct trucks on my drive have cut in line at a left turn lane with a red arrow and crossed 2 lanes opposing traffic at different lights, what would possess someone to do that(?))
Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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"
>The rate of drivers who tested positive for THC did not change significantly before or after legalization (42.1% vs. 45.2%), indicating that legal status did not influence the behavior of those who chose to drive after use.
That being the case, I'm not sure what the policy prescription should be here, if any.
Anybody who's smoked a lot of weed knows that THC tolerance works very differently from alcohol tolerance. If you've been ripping dabs every couple hours for the last month, you might be well above the legal limit and barely feel different at all. On the other hand, if you haven't smoked in a year and take a single hit of a modern joint, you could be floored.
I'm not sure how THC intoxication could be measured, but blood THC concentration feels like an incredibly crude metric compared to BAC.
> 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.
> Progressive love to repeat this, but it doesn't make it true.
Conservatives love to deny this, but it doesn't make it false. That criminalization was an immediate, direct substitute for chattel slavery is extensively documented, and that the patterns of criminalization used for that purpose became culturally entrenched and spread (even where the particular practices on top of that served to make it a replacement for chattel slavery, like convict leasing, generally did not in their original form beyond the South, though commercial exploitation of coerced prison labor did become a widespread national phenomenon, even though there has been some winding back in some jurisdictions of that particular practice in recent years.)
> 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.
Somehow every part of this paragraph just keeps getting less correct.
America doesn't have "world-leading" criminality by literally any metric you care to choose.
Even if it did, also having world leading incarceration rates might make a rational, scientific type fellow wonder about how those could both be true!
Also, those are not in fact the only alternatives. It's not even difficult to think of more than those two. Have you even tried?
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.
>An average level of 30.7 ng/mL generally means those people must have consumed marijuana at some time close to driving.
Averages do not work that way! The average of 48, 48, 48, 3 and 3 is 30. The study findings remain interesting but the actual proportion of impaired drivers may be less than 40%.
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%.
It will be interesting to read the actual study when it comes out.
Interesting questions:
* What is the baseline of consumption / THC level?
* what was the alcohol level in decesased drivers ? (e..g how many people only had alcohol, how many only THC, how many had both, how many had nothing.
* Are there other test scenarios where THC screening is mandatory that could help getting to the baseline ? Are there ways to get an approximate answer from sewers, like they did for Covid?
> 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.
This paper would need to go into way more detail to be at all useful.
40% is a staggering number, which makes me suspect that all it measures is Montgomery County police's pretty good track record for deciding when to test someone for THC during an autopsy
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.
Does anyone else constantly smell weed while driving around? Several times per week I find myself behind a car that wreaks so bad of weed that I can clearly smell it driving a few car lengths behind. I have to wonder…if so many people are smoking enough to smell it in another car while moving, exactly how many people on the road are high?
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.
I have it on good authority and a lot of data that over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for recently having (i) breathed air containing oxygen, (ii) drank tap water (iii) were wearing shoes, (iv) had used those shoes to get to the car, ...
Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study (facs.org)
281 points by bookofjoe 15 hours ago | flag | hide | 420 comments
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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.
Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving simulator, and measure their performance?
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.
I remember reading that in an accident with one party intoxicated and the other not, the intoxicated party is more likely to survive because they are more relaxed and can take an impact better.
But of course sober people are less likely to get into single car fatality causing accidents I'm sure.
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 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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Impairment is somewhat orthogonal to drug or alcohol intoxication. It's not safe to drive if you've been awake for 24+ hours, for example, or have some other medical condition (hypoglycemia, whatever) that impairs your ability to drive safely.
This has nothing to do with "intoxication" or sleep deprivation, or medical conditions. Some police will lie and charge people with "DUI" when there is zero justification, and they ruin lives because too many of them are sadistic assholes. It's in epidemic in Tennessee and other parts of the country, but it really could happen anywhere to anyone. Police unions are a problem, and taxpayers pay for the litigation when someone actually fights back against false charges.
So what? This line of argument can be used to dismiss essentially any crime, because police can always lie about whatever the particular crime is. It's not a principled reason not to have laws or enforce them.
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.
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.
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.
That's evidence of increased public/open-air consumption, which is to be expected with legalization
Don't need to hide it anymore, especially if the local police don't have much to do otherwise
>That's evidence of increased public/open-air consumption, which is to be expected with legalization
>Don't need to hide it anymore, especially if the local police don't have much to do otherwise
Yep. At least in New York City before legalization, using cannabis in public earned you an arrest and a night in jail despite the fact that it wasn't even a misdemeanor, just a local code violation with a $50 fine.
That was done consistently (I know several folks who were caught up in such chicanery) for decades to deter folks from using in public.
But enforcement was spotty and, as usual, melanin content played an outsized role in determining who would be "enforced."
Thank goodness that's not happening anymore.
Edit: Fixed prose ('we' --> 'were')>
I have DEFINITELY noticed an increase in public usage yeah. Which is strange because that was not legalized in Ohio. Smoking a joint in your car going down the road or at the park is as illegal as it ever was.
I’m sure overall usage numbers are up because I know a lot of people who started using it after they could buy it legally, but those people are all also infrequent users and I’m sure are not driving high. The people who would be deterred by weed being illegal are probably all in the “won’t drive stoned” category. (I’m sure many infrequent users pre-legalization, myself included, were never much worried about the legality but don’t drive high because we like being alive, and we continue to not do so now.)
My fragrant walks around town put me in proximity to neighbors kicking it on their own property, visible and aromatic but not crossing the threshold into what I would consider to be 'public usage'. They're in their garage on folding chairs with the door open, or in the yard, or on a back porch.
In addition to the distinctive smell of marijuana, there is often a recreational fire (wood smoke), and/or a BBQ (sizzling meat). It's publicly visible and apparent, but on private property.
I have never been that social, haven't accepted a pass in decades, don't imbibe myself (despite my internym), and don't recommend it to young folk, but I must be getting a microdose and a minor contact high from the gentle breeze that floats through town more often since legalization.
Second hand smoke is real, yo. The wind blows.
So now children are exposed to psychoactive drug fumes in our parks, with no way to avoid them. Ideal, such progress.
The study in the post we’re responding to has actual data to show otherwise. The data was collected both before and after legalization (and Ohio is one of the states studied) and did not find a significant increase.
Weed was already easy to get. Any high schooler would have told you it was easier to get than beer BECAUSE it was illegal, nobody had a lucrative license to use for selling it to a minor.
Same thing in DC. I thought the new development in DC where we lived had a major sewer gas problem. Turns out it was marijuana.
Genuinely asking - had you never smelled cannabis before living in DC?
To claim the odor is mistakable for sewer gas is borderline funny, unless you’re slyly trying to name a new strain.
I've never smelled cannabis before in my life and don't know what it's supposed to smell like. I live in an area of the world where it's illegal and I guess not many people are smoking it. I may also have had a quite sheltered education.
This year, I went to British Columbia, and there was this weird scent everywhere that I could not describe. My wife said it was cannabis. I'm still not used to it so I don't know if I'll be able to recognize it next time I travel to North America.
In my experience, weed smells like a skunk. Which makes it really annoying to be around people who smoke, that stuff is really unpleasant to have to smell. Honestly I don't know how people can stand to smoke it with how bad it smells.
I never smelled a skunk, but the first time I smelled this weed smell I immediately loved it and still love it to this day when I occasionally smell it on the street. Even though I don't smoke. I even bought cannabis scent incense few days ago.
I guess perception of this smell, like many others is genetic.
Different weed smells different, skunk weed has volitale sulfur compounds, others varieties lack this and may smell like fruit or rosemary.
I always describe the smell like a cross between a skunk and a Christmas tree.
Am I the only one that doesn't find skunk smell not so horrid as it's generally made out to be? It's very strong, yes, but between skunk and asa foetida, it would be hard to choose ;)
Any strong smell is unpleasant, especially when it's unavoidable, from perfume to petrol fumes, even along to food smells.
Asa foetida is way worse than skunk
I’ve never smoked it or been around anyone smoking it. It’s more of a lower class thing in the U.S.: https://news.gallup.com/poll/642851/cannabis-greatest-among-... (16% of households making under $24k smoke cannibis regularly, versus 5% of households making over $180k/year).
hell yeah for being in that 5%! but why bring classism into it? in states where it’s more normalized, it’s pretty even across those differentiators:
https://doh.wa.gov/data-and-statistical-reports/washington-t...
This 100% matches my experience in Washington. I know a lot of upper middle class who use cannabis. I think the consumption of edibles might be higher in the upper middle class vs smoked. But that’s very anecdotal.
Explaining why I never encountered it. Even today usage is quite unevenly distributed. I’m from an affluent, WASPy town in Virginia. By contrast it was common even in the 1990s in the lower class parts of Oregon where my wife grew up.
Interesting. In my experience, the self-described affluent WASP-y types are exactly the kind of people that should probably smoke a joint and chill the fuck out every once in a while, lest they end up as close-minded conservatives.
Thanks for sharing!
You’re more likely to find tattoos and marijuana smokers at a Trump rally than in the congressional district where I grew up. It was solidly red when I was growing up, but today is the orderly and industrious wing of the democratic party (Biden +18).
An inspiring tale of progress and change for the better! May more southern states unfetter themselves from regressive views.
It’s entropy, not progress.
Is that because strong Republican-voting states are such bastions of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?
Last time I checked, places like Texas are using traffic cameras to track down women who get healthcare out of state, bragging about killing people, and posting State Troopers outside of bathrooms.
Or maybe you're talking about Arkansas, where they recently deregulated the employment of children under 16.
Or maybe you meant Florida, which led the nation in banned books for 2025.
Or maybe Tennessee where they allow for the refusal to solemnize gay marriage after the passage of HB 878.
Maybe you're alluding to states like Louisiana and Mississippi, which have the highest per capita incarceration rates in the US.
Seriously, humor me here - what in your opinion has become more "entropic" in VA since they started voting more consistently blue?
You will be. This scent is very distinct.
I had never smelled it before. It smells identical to sewer gas to me—I know what that smells like because our house was missing several drain traps.
Fascinating. I wonder if this is a genetic thing similar to people who sense soap for cilantro, except with terpenes instead of aldehydes.
Youth these days tend to say “this weed has gas” rather than “this weed is dank”. I’m unsure if that is just due to gassy strains becoming more popular or just lingo. Garlic is another rising scent.
I mean weed really doesn't smell good. If you're not turned off by the smell, it's a learned pleasure. Similar to how nearly every child will dislike the taste of alcohol, yet after drinking for a while they'll learn to tolerate or enjoy it.
It can be a very overpowering smell. When an odor overpowers, it's harder to discern one scent from another.
> If you're not turned off by the smell, it's a learned pleasure.
For me it's was love at first smell. And I didn't smoke. Just smelled it from th adjecent room. It must be genetic.
Alcohol is always dreadful for me. Same goes for cigarettes.
there are strains that, to me, smell pleasant. maybe you’re extrapolating a bit? terpenes are what make up most essential oils, in fact.
I’ve never smelled pot that didn’t stink. It does not smell like a sewer to me but it distinctly smells like skunk.
A few years ago, I moved from San Francisco to a rural area. Smelling weed in SF was not at all unusual. One summer night in the rural area, I smelled it coming through open windows for the first time. I wondered which house it was coming from and how it still smelled so strong after traveling a hundred feet or more. Then I spotted the actual skunk in our yard.
Mango, especially dried, smells and tastes of terpenes sometimes. I sometimes question why I like Mango ;)
most essential oils also smell bad in their pure form, you can always sense a smoker or a big essential oils person from their scent from afar
You're always going on about the Netherlands, surely that is based on some experience of being here and if so then you must have smelled weed it is impossible to miss on the streets of any city with more than 100K inhabitants and an active inner city.
The first time I smelt weed it reminded me of a skunk.
I could see how that might be mistaken as sewage.
It’s very skunky. I thought a skunk had been killed on an industrial road I drive sometimes. The smell was there for months. I finally realized there’s a cannabis processing facility there. Still stinks years later now.
As somebody who has no problem whatsoever with weed, it smells like pus from a tooth infection to me.
I have had dental abscesses in the past that made my mouth taste like I was in a room full of cannabis smoke.
this is surprising to hear - thanks for sharing! i still can’t help but wonder if there are some perceptive differences at play here versus something learned.
Also the amount of people in DC who drive while smoking weed seems very high(no pun intended). Based on the number of cars that can be smelled from another car while in traffic.
[flagged]
Living in proximity to people who don't care enough to not be annoying to others has a few ways you can look at it. But I suggest you consider upgrading the cabin air filter in your car. There are likely options with activated carbon to help reduce odors. This was actually a factor in my decision to go Tesla: their models S and X have an additional massive HEPA filter, and absolutely no outside smells make it into the car.
These horror-style anecdotes are hilarious echoes from decades past.
oh no, he had the reefer madness?
But this paper specifically rules out legalization as cause because the numbers didn’t significantly increase after legalization.
How does this rule anything out? It is totally possible actual usage of THC didn't increase after legalization. It wasn't one of the hardest things to find when it was illegal.
I think you’re misunderstanding. The paper says that the rates of dead drivers having THC in their system above the threshold did not change significantly after legalization. So legalizing isn’t the culprit, exactly for the reason you cite: people could get it just fine before.
Legalization does not signify usage.
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
If the population of dead drivers with over the limit THC is 40%, and this dramatically exceeds the population average, that would strongly suggest the THC level IS an indicator of either:
1. Impairment from THC, or
2. Worse than average driving and risk management skills in those who use the drug
Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?
It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.
This is a knowable thing, it just needs to be studied (I'm actually surprised it's not been TBH). Give people a standard set of coordination tests and then draw their blood to see what the THC level is.
If we were just interested in outcomes (in an accident or not), we should just be measuring that. But I guess if we can’t measure that, a litmus test is better than nothing.
2. young people are worse drivers and more likely to use
Right, so it might just mean that reckless drivers are more likely to smoke weed.
The expected number seems to be about 20+% (depending on assumptions) so this is higher than expected but not drastically so.
Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.
I would say that anyone who smokes anything (cigarettes, vapes, cannabis, crack) is indicating that they're at best not health conscious and are acting in a nihilistic way. It seems entirely logical that their risk-tolerance and judgement will be accordingly different to the general population whether they're high or not.
It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.
I can't make sense of it mathematically. A statistical distribution fitting these characteristics does not exist.
If non-weeders have an average seat belt wearing, and if weeders also have an average seat belt wearing, then the proportion of weeders inside of the seat belt non-wearing class is just equal to the proportion of weeders inside the whole population.
How are people not wearing seatbelt? I've never seen a car that doesn't make a constant annoying noise if you're not wearing it while driving. Do they mod the car to disable this safety system? That seems too far stretched...
Older cars don't have these systems. Also they are easy to bypass with a dummy buckle. There are counties where seatbelt usage is far less common than the US.
Then you've only ever seen fairly new, modern cars. Seatbelt warnings are a relatively new feature.
Seat belt warnings became mandatory in the USA in 1972[0]. From the mid 1970s until fairly recently, the warning tone would stop after a few seconds.
[0] https://www.nationalacademies.org/read/10832/chapter/5
I've known people who would just endure the warning noise until it stopped.
Many of them are just a light, and that's it. Or maybe the buzzer was burnt out lol.
My parents disabled a couple by pulling a fuse or cutting a wire, but a lot of their use of the vehicles was off road at walking speeds. They wore seat belts on the road.
Mawr’s out there driving his Model T around town.
I've had annoying seatbelt warnings on my cars aging back to at least the 90s.
Just click the belt in with no one occupying the seat and sit on top of it.
I never understood this though. It seems like more work and even more uncomfortable just to knowingly make things worse for yourself.
Either O B E Y or do what you named as "more work". Different person chooses different way of dealing with annoyances.
Don't fool yourself. In the end you have to obey the laws of physics and the punishment is extremely harsh and permanent.
I read comment as "don't resist our egregious power, our business is to keep becoming more powerful by arguments with different persuasive power".
I have to admit, the car safety argument is among the most persuasive, like do you want to get harmed? But in reality the question is not about "harming and nothing more", the question is about growing the egregious power AND caring about the tax payers simultaneously.
I never agreed to be bound to some "law of conservation of momentum"! I'm a free person!
Many of them stop beeping for a while (or beep way less often)
Sometimes you can change a setting in software with a programmer via the obd2 port. It's not "too far" it's easy.
But even simpler is just a pacifier. Trivial.
As a reminder of how little things change. I remember watching an old video from sometime when seatbelt laws were mandated in Texas.
People were rambling on about how they basically live in the Soviet Union.
You had me until the last sentence. Your easy assumption seems nonsensical to me.
It seems much more straightforward to me to assume impairment. This is the obvious corollary, not seat belts.
It could be seat belts, of course, but I don't think that's the obvious conclusion.
The seat belts comment is so apt. We should be looking at the full population of drivers involved in accidents, not just those that went through a windshield.
Restraints play such a pivotal role in crash safety, but not wearing them isn't a meaningful indicator of impairment status.
Is this a joke?
The people who don't wear seatbelts are in my observation old folks who grew up without them or before using them was mandatory. It's just their habit.
I've almost never seen a person under about age 40 not using a seatbelt.
No. I don't know a lot of people that don't wear seatbelts, but they all smoke weed. All of my friends that died in car wrecks weren't wearing seat belts and would have definitely tested positive for THC.
I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.
The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.
While I do not commonly ride in cars driven by people outside my family, my experience has been quite the opposite: when I do ride in cars with older people, they buckle up as a matter of course, while when I ride with younger people, they are much more likely not to.
The second seems eminently plausible with the correlation between driving skills and drug use both being due to higher risk tolerance.
Doesn't that support the hypothesis that high THC levels are dangerously impairing people's driving?
You need to consider other confounding factors
It is well shown that age (youth) is a major factor in accident rates.
Not necessarily, they could both be a comorbidity of some other factor (bad decision making causes both, for instance) but it certainly doesn’t refute it.
That was my first thought on reading it. Dope is for dopes!
- [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.
I don't understand how this study can make that claim just looking at crash report data. The assumption that not at fault drivers are representative of people who aren't in accidents at all is pretty generous? It seems likely that folks who are unimpaired are also better at avoiding accidents / driving defensively
My preferred way to wade through a political research topic like this is to look at the aviation industry. If a pilot can not use a medical substance, then it is very likely that there is some thing there. Pilots are generally fairly high investment, and they are also fairly international in research and standards. All nations with an airforce tend also be interested in such research, regardless of current political flavor.
From glancing at it, it seems that TCH impair pilots ability. Here is such study (done with flight sims). https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1849400/
"The results support our preliminary study and suggest that very complex human/machine performance can be impaired as long as 24h after smoking a moderate social dose of marijuana, and that the user may be unaware of the drug's influence. "
I think that aviation has a lot of factors that bias its decisions conservatively. The “cost” of being conservative can be pretty easily borne in aviation. As an example, Zyrtec is grounding for 48 hours after taking. I think most Zyrtec users drive daily and likely quite safely, but aviation can afford to ground pilots at a lower level of risk than probably makes sense for drivers.
(I have very little doubt that THC is impairing; that pilots can’t legally use it is only very loosely related to that likely linkage.)
I think you miss the point of the comment you replied to.
> The law's assumption that this level of THC is evidence of impairment seems to be invalid.
I think most will recognize that THC causes impairment. The question that (AFAIK) is unanswered is if it can be measured simply by looking at the concentration of THC in the blood.
In fact, if you look into the mechanisms for alcohol tolerance vs THC tolerance. What you'll find is that alcohol tolerance is a result of the body developing fast paths for breaking down ethanol. Meaning the same BAC will have the same intoxication level, the body just works harder to keep the BAC down.
THC tolerance, on the other hand, appears to be the THC receptors becoming desensitized to THC. Which means the body doesn't appear to metabolize THC faster as tolerance builds.
That's where a blood test might not be a good indicator of THC impairment.
What the aviation study show is that the impair can continue for a very long time after a single small use. A blood test might be a terrible indicator how how much the impairment is, but the question then is how much tolerance you need in order to have zero impairment under some levels of THC. It also but a bit of doubt that even after 24hrs the impairment can be noticed, long past where the user subjectively feel any effect.
Alcohol tolerance might even be a positive here, since a drinker can drink a glass of beer 24hrs before a flight and be fairly certain that the ethanol has been broken down, regardless of tolerance. If THC metabolize slower as the body builds tolerance, then the impairment may continue for a longer time at a lower intensity even for a small dose, increasing the period of uncertainty.
The question then becomes "what level of impairment is tolerable".
Driving doesn't require perfect cognition, just good enough. If we went for perfect then anyone over 65 would be banned from operating a car.
And I think that's the hard thing with THC. Yes you may be impaired 24 hours later, but how impaired and how does that compare to age related impairment.
I could see that. In Sweden there were recently a buss accident where a health issue with the driver caused them to black out, killing several people and injuring even more. We put a lot of trust in commercial drivers that are responsible for managing people and several tons of moving vehicle. Pilots employed by commercial airlines generally have an age limit at around 65-68.
What level of impairment is tolerable when the buss driver are driving on the highway at highway speeds?
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Nearly half of drivers killed in (Ohio County) crashes had THC in their blood - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730 - Oct 2025 (125 comments)
If that's the conclusion you'd also expect 40% of the population using it.
I would expect there to be significant overlap between the demographics of those who more commonly get in accidents and those who use THC. Based on nsc.org, it seems like the majority of car accidents are with drivers 25-34 years old, and occur more frequently late at night on weekends. That generally matches the profile of the stereotypical THC user. It is hard to find good numbers of THC use.
Remember that not all the population drives, nor are accidents randomly distributed in the population.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/crashes-b...
So in other words, people with a less risk-averse personality are more likely to engage in risky behaviors
”That generally matches the profile of the stereotypical THC user”
Got a source for that claim?
That sounds about right to be honest
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.
> 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.
isn't that just common addiction response?
"no, nothing's wrong with me. my drugs aren't the problem - you are the problem"
I think most addicts when not high/drunk/fucked up off their substance of choice would admit that they they are more impaired and not good to drive when they are on their substance of choice.
But you'll still find some small percentage of them claiming they wouldn't be impaired.
Source: have actually spend a lot of time around addicts.
Isn’t it suspicious that no matter what the circumstances, their current decision-making is correct and their past one wasn’t? It seems somewhat self-unaware.
You have to tune down your self-estimate’s value if your self-estimate shows historical poor performance.
Anecdata: There are neurochemical upregulation effects to daily THC use over time, and upon discontinuance that upregulation (which can take months or even years to wear off and perhaps not) is in itself quite apparent.
Every pot smoker is convinced it enhances their life while it ultimately just devolves them all into the exact same personality.
Got any real sources? I've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.
> 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.
You're only expected to crash 500 or so times per 100 million miles as the base rate[0]. If you were impaired enough to have 2x or 3x the risk of crashing then it's entirely possible that you wouldn't crash, or that other factors would play a larger role.
[0] https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...
You probably are compared to your baseline self (another comment goes more extensively on this subject) but maybe you have enough driving skills and common sense to minimize the risks somewhat.
Planning, good sense, and caution go a long way to compensate for physical impairment. Weed is different from booze in that booze increases risk taking, which makes driving such a danger. But that doesn’t mean weed doesn’t impair in some material way compared to baseline.
Your average driver on alcohol: goes 100 miles per hour into a tree
Your average driver on weed: drives 5 miles per hour to the taco bell drive thru
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.
we both know one does not get impaired by spliff or two the same way she does after drink or two.
In the south people drive drunk over the legal alcohol limit all the time, most don’t crash. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.
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 high basically for 15 years straight and was a professional athlete during that time in a sport that requires a lot of coordination. I know many other athletes that are heavy users, the majority of the best athletes I've ever known were actually. So how do you think that works?
I don't trust anyone else on the road because all of you are comically bad drivers compared to someone like me.
> 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?
Wait, how is mayo, vegan or not, related to dairy?
For some reason, people lump eggs in with dairy, presumably because they're unaware of the difference between hens and cows. You'd have to have quite a lot of detectable THC in your system to confuse the two, but here we are, people think that eggs are the same as milk.
To be fair, my milkman delivers eggs as well as milk, cream, and butter, but they come from a totally different farm.
Dairy is a category that depending on context may or may not include eggs. In this case the distinction doesn’t matter. Vegans wouldn’t have experience with strictly defined dairy or eggs.
TIL! I am not American.
A perfect vegan alternative to mayonnaise is aioli, which consists only of garlic, olive oil, and salt.
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?
You think 40% of the population is using? That seems like a pretty big reach to me.
I have no idea, but we should know the baseline if we want to know the effect
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.
> 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
Yes, IF. That was my point.
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
> I've been a daily user for over 10 years and also have a spotless driving record.
n sample size of 1 does not prove anything.
Source? Source? Got any source about me? Yeah well those statistics only deal with other people who aren’t me, so I guess you’re not really trusting the science :/
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.
Less coughing and effects of smoke, but the burnout is definitely due to daily THC, even if you vape it or do dabs.
(To be clear, I don't think every daily user is a 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.Okay, that was insensitive of me.
But yes, what you say is the logical consequence (except I'm not kidding about grief and impatience).
My point really is that if we want our kids not to get horribly injured or killed, we can't just focus on "other people" making bad decisions like driving drunk. We have to acknowledge that we've collectively built a system that requires people to put each other in danger with cars, and we have to think about how to change that. Cars bring a lot of benefits like autonomy and decentralization, how do we keep that but kill fewer people?
> Cars bring a lot of benefits like autonomy and decentralization, how do we keep that but kill fewer people?
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
This is a solved problem: look at the current state-of-the-art road design documents from the Netherlands. Apply. Problem solved.
Per 1 billion vehicle-km the US has 6.9 deaths and the Netherlands has 4.7 deaths. That’s obviously better much but I wouldn’t call it “problem solved”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
(Wikipedia links to itf-oecd.org/ where those numbers come From)
My guess is better road design means less miles driven by cars (as opposed to other, safer vehicles) and therefore fewer accidents overall, even if car crash statistics remain the same.
Buy a Tesla with FSD. No, it’s not L5 autonomy, but it’s already safer than the average human driver…and autonomous cars will only get better.
The solution is to make the roads safer in general and/or reduce road use, not to take away people's keys for relatively tiny risk factors.
And in particular for the Uber situation, if taking a taxi 10 miles causes 15 miles of taxi-driving, that's less safe than driving 10 miles with a small to medium impairment.
0% impaired? We know tired drivers are impaired. Should we require drivers to demonstrate 8hrs of sleep before operating a vehicle? What about people who do ok on less sleep? I think there are obvious issues with such a proposal and those issues transfer to THC usage. I would bet, if we could measure it, a large portion of fatal accidents would involve people who are not fully rested and had missed the 8hr target multiple times in the preceding week or two
There's not really such a thing as 0% impaired. People fluctuate day to day, hour to hour, and have different baselines.
Sure.. I just was addressing the goal makes sense that drivers are not impaired. Of course nobody is perfect.
A goal like that is far enough from what is actually possible that I think it's not a good goal. Maybe a slogan.
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.
Some of those cities you listed have rather high death rates for young adults for reasons unrelated to cars.
I don't think you understand what "inherently dangerous" actually means.
FYI murder requires intent, otherwise it is just manslaughter. Your indoctrination is showing by your turns of phrase.
Inherently means “qualities or traits that are intrinsic and fundamental, not added or external”
So yea cars are inherently dangerous.
I’m not sure who you think I’m indoctrinated by but around 3000 people are killed every year in my country by cars.
Meanwhile around 200 people are murdered each year.
I’ll give you one try to guess which one dominates the newspapers and public discourse.
And you tell me something about indoctrination, real funny
Cars are inherently dangerous, though. They're multi ton hunks of metal moving at high speeds. That's dangerous from literally any angle you can imagine.
There are ways to make it less dangerous, sure. But they're never 100% safe. Which makes them, by definition, inherently dangerous. That's... What those words mean.
So long as you’re also willing to label swimming pools, grapes, and crayons as, by definition, inherently dangerous on account of not being able to be made 100% safe, then I’ll at least grant you a level of consistency in your argument.
Swimming pools are absolutely inherently dangerous. Why do you think lifeguards are a thing?
Like, really man? If you can't even recognize as dangerous the one activity that famously requires someone specifically trained to save people to be present, then I'm happy to end this conversation right here. It's clearly just a waste of time all around. I just hope there's no one in your life depending on you to judge what's safe and what's not.
No lifeguard on duty. Swim at your own risk.
Comparing "100% safe" vs the danger cars represent is so ridiculous I have to question if you're kidding? We're talking 40,000 people killed every year in the US alone on account of traffic accidents. And you're talking about grapes and crayons?
And swimming pools are pretty dangerous though? There are around 4,500 drowning deaths per year in the US, so on the order of 10x fewer than due to car accidents, but still quite a lot.
GP is the one who argued “not 100% safe” as evidence of inherently unsafe.
I agree with you that it’s a comically wrong threshold, which is why I offered that series that was progressively more safe but never 100% safe as examples against that line of reasoning.
Make the threshold "won't kill you 99.9% of the time, even if you have little to no training at that specific activity" then. Is that specific enough for you to engage meaningfully with the conversation at hand, and show why you think driving is at the same side of this threshold as eating grapes or using crayons?
> Also, my son was just hit by a driver while he was on a bike and in the bike lane.
Let me guess, the painted line on the road did not in fact prevent the vehicle from crossing into the bike lane? What we as a society consider acceptable cycling infrastructure is pathetic.
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.
Perhaps habitual drug users should not participate in operating heavy machinery around people?
Should alcoholics be barred from driving as well, even if they are perfectly sober when behind the wheel?
Statistically, yes they should.
Even if your point is conceded which I will state as: "the impairment levels are too so that unimpaired habitual pot users appear impaired"
40% of the general population is not a habitual cannabis user. So whether they are "high" or not, folks with high THc levels are dangerous.
Yes, you cannot drive if you smoke cannabis at all. Seems fine, now just get them off the road.
And there are alcoholics who remain highly functional well over the legal limit.
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!
using a mean rather than median is fairly odd here. a mean is pretty much worthless without knowing distribution shape.
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.
I partially agree, but it is still relevant, because there is a relatively low upper bound to the values possible after which someone would literally be unable to even walk to their car to start driving.
When the average is SO high above the legal limit, and with this constraint that there is an upper bound, it's absolutely relevant.
This seems like an intentionally misleading title, since they don't mention that the study was for one county (Montgomery County) in Ohio, which is basically just Dayton, OH and surrounding rural area - < 600k people.
I'm sure you can pick other counties in the US which have either very high representation of THC users or very low representations. Without knowing how other counties score in terms of driver fatalities and THC, this is not really very useful.
To me it sounds like an effort to paint THC as big and scary. But in my experience living in a few large cities, weed is rare - but lots of people go out, drink, and drive home one or more times per week.
ScienceDaily goes even further by rounding up to 50% and burying the location halfway down the summarization.
"Nearly half of drivers killed in crashes had THC in their blood THC-impaired driving deaths are soaring, and legalization hasn’t slowed the trend. Date: October 5, 2025 Source: American College of Surgeons Summary: Over 40% of fatal crash victims had THC levels far above legal limits, showing cannabis use before driving remains widespread. The rate didn’t drop after legalization, suggesting policy changes haven’t altered risky habits. Experts warn that the lack of public awareness around marijuana’s dangers behind the wheel is putting lives at risk."
Unless they publish who funded the study, I'm skeptical that the alcohol industry might be involved. It's absolutely in their best interest to paint marijuana as the devil (and take attention away from alcohol).
Obviously nobody should be driving with any impairment, but people do - driving tired, texting, even talking to passengers and turning their heads to look at the passengers while they talk! (Really, why??? I see people doing this all the time.)
To give some statistical context, as of 2023, about 16.11% of people in the US have used cannabis in the past year; per that same dataset, about 16.53% of Ohio residents. [1] Given that Ohio’s usage metrics align closely with the national mean, I think it's fair to use the state as a proxy for broader domestic trends.
Per more Pew Research data, also from 2023, Ohio seems to have an average, if not a less than average, concentration of cannabis dispensaries, compared to other states where CBD products were legal. Montgomery County, OH is located in the bottom-left quarter of Ohio, and sits in a region with lower dispensary density than many comparable U.S. districts. [2]
Given that usage metrics mirror the national mean despite a lower-than-average retail presence, I think this dataset is a pretty fair "middle america" benchmark.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/723822/cannabis-use-with... [2] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/29/most-amer...
You cannot pick and choose one or two variables and then claim representativeness based on a numerical match. The first step is to identify the confounding variables that are likely to influence the outcome. Only after those are specified a comparison set can be defined and matching or adjustment criteria applied. Without that process, agreement on a small number of aggregate measures does not establish that the underlying populations or mechanisms are comparable.
I'll concede this, however in large-scale demographic data, when the central tendencies of two populations align so closely, it is statistically unlikely that their underlying distributions are radically different. It puts the burden of proof on the idea that Ohio is somehow an outlier, rather than the idea that it's a standard sample. Otherwise, were we to attempt to account for every confounding variable, we would be letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Thanks for the data. While it does need more cross referencing it would indicated that deceased drivers are more than twice as likely to have traces of THC. We need to eliminate non-drivers but I think the proportion of drivers with traces of THC will remain higher with drivers than in the overall population.
Next, same stat for alcohol, that would be interesting.
Maybe adapt the THC threshold a bit to really only count people who recently consumed THC.
> I'm skeptical that the alcohol industry might be involved.
So you don't think that the alcohol industry is involved?
You sound like the people who were outraged when drinking and driving was first banned. They had all sorts of made up logic to get around wanting to consistently being a hazard to others.
You think 40% of the people in that area have THC in their system?
Of course you don't. So why make this argument?
Are you funded by Big Cannabis™?
Upvoted!
I’ve applied this same rule when reading news or watching tv - if your immediate reaction is shock, surprise, or anger, think of a list of organisations who would monetarily benefit [1] from that article or show etc.
Nobody does a news story for the fun of it unless it genuinely IS news, but it’s been shown [2] that over 70% is PR pieces trying to make you think one way or another.
[1] money talks, and bullshit walks
[2] Australia’s Media Watch ran a piece about this a few years ago
The news outlet makes money if it’s shocking or surprising, you don’t have to search any further. Your logic is flawed here I believe.
[flagged]
You may have broken the record of fallacies per inch there.
"Weed addicts".
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 biggest problem with drawing conclusions from the 40% number is that THC use correlates with other well established crash death risks like being a young driver or the use of other impairing substances.
The fact that legalization did not impact the crash rates is also a strong signal that THC itself is not causing the crashes.
The presence of THC in the blood is not a reliable signal for intoxication, so further research is needed to draw any type of conclusion.
Finally, it's also been noted that there are some sample bias concerns because the data comes from fatal crashes where it was determined that a drug test should be administered after the crash.
> 40% having significant THC in their blood is a stunning statistic no matter how you look at it.
Yes, it is a stunning statistic.
So much so, that in itself it makes it worth questioning the results of this study.
If 40% of fatal crash victims had THC in their bloodstream, and only 20% of the general population did, that would imply a 100% increase in chances of dying in a car crash from having smoked marijuana. That's an absolutely massive risk factor, the kind you would expect to show up very, very clearly in any kind of statistical analysis of car crashes.
But the other thing I've seen a bunch of people cite in this discussion is that there has been no statistically significant increase in fatal crashes following marijuana legalization.
That would imply that either there was no statistically significant increase in drivers high on marijuana since legalization, or there was no statistically significant increase in the likelihood of causing a fatal crash from being high on marijuana.
Based on our knowledge of human nature, the former seems incredibly unlikely (yes, there would surely be some people who would have been smoking pot before who just stopped hiding it as much, but there would also, just as surely, be many people who had been interested in getting high before, but who had been intimidated by its legal status or had no idea how to find a dealer until there were dispensaries opening in every town).
The latter directly contradicts the implication of this study—but this is only one study, and may have methodological issues that we are unaware of.
No not at all. Let's do it this way:
What percentage of people who drive drunk have consumed thc within the time window of blood detection?
Now this is a more reasonable number
I really don't know why this number is significant. Accidents are situational and people who engage in situations where accidents are more frequent likely make other decisions about consumption and lifestyle which involve things like cannabis
Who cares?
You aren't going to elevate the behavior of the population by regulating a plant
The number of people who report using it is only a rough proxy for the number of people who are using it, though.
Yes, very rough. Marijuana still being illegal at the federal level, and often illegal at the state level, means it's not always in your best interest to self-report.
For example, in my doctor's questionnaires. "Have you used illegal drugs in the last year?" I'm always going to say no. I don't trust security and privacy enough to say otherwise.
And yes, for HN scrapers, I'll mention this is all hypothetical.
Not sure how much it differs from the US, but in Australia disclosing previous drug use is unlikely to provoke any response from authorities. The main drug crimes are possession and selling AFAIK, not using.
True! But insurance companies (in the U.S. at least) would also love to know that information...
I think its much more significant than the studies done by potheads who think they are cool to drive.
You can't drive at 12 though surely? And you have to account for the fact that young people are going to be more likely to die in crashes and more likely to use weed.
This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.
Surely this has been done?
>This kind of test seems silly. It's going to be far too hard to remove the confounding variables. Much easier just to give people different levels of weed and have them do driving tests. Directly measure their driving skill instead of doing it by shitty proxy like this.
Given that differing levels of THC impact people differently both because of potential "tolerance" in frequent users as compared with occasional users and individual responses to cannabis (and even different cannabis strains with varied chemical profiles). There may well be other confounding factors as well.
Cannabis does not affect everyone the same way. It doesn't even affect the same people in the same way every time.
As such, while the testing you suggest may well be useful over the long term, it will require large populations and repeated testing at varying levels of both subjective intoxication and THC levels in the blood over extended periods to get good data about how THC use (both in temporal proximity and overall usage patterns) causes impairment.
As anecdata, I can absolutely say that lower levels of THC consumption results in much more impairment if cannabis hasn't been used recently and higher levels result in less impairment if there has been recent use.
That's not to say that driving (or any high-risk activity) is appropriate while actually high. It is not. Driving while impaired (by anything) is a terrible idea.
You really think there arnt 20% of people who use but don’t report? What a crock of shit.
It is my experience that people who smoke weed won't shut the fuck up about it and will take ANY opportunity to make sure you know it.
The n for the group is only 246 though. That’s very biased depending on where the stats are from.
Very bold to claim it's a biased sample without any evidence or even a theory of how.
The evidence is the n being 246 lol
What, specifically, would be an optimal sample size and why, specifically, is 246 insufficient, in this case? “Lol”
I'm not a statistician but when I know when I've only gotten 250 users through a split test it's not even worth looking at the results. So just for you I'm going to say 10,000 and geographically spread from more than one county in Ohio which contains a University.
> 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.
>focusing on 246 deceased drivers who were tested for THC following a fatal crash”. That means there could be selection bias at play.
that wording definitely sets off warning alarms for selection bias. but it looks like there were approximately 350 traffic deaths in montgomery county during that period [1]. that probably about lines up with 246 drivers dying during that period, so it seems likely they tested all or almost all deceased drivers.
[1] https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/statepatrol.ohio.go...
They failed to present the average _age_ of the drivers as well. Young drivers are more often involved in fatalities than older drivers. This is clear if you look at the NHTSA's FARS database.
“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.
I think there is definable a connection between cannabis use and auto accidents. It slows your reaction time and that’s a known factor with accidents. That said, substance use data is notoriously underreported[1] in surveys. So that 20% data point is not very helpful. Also 12-15 year olds are bringing that number down in your data and also can’t drive making it even less useful for comparison.
[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089085672...
And substance use impairment is overreported. If the driver was impaired it's counted even if the impairment has no bearing on the accident. A drunk hits a red light runner--it's called alcohol even if he had no hope of avoiding it.
My understanding of stoned drivers is they tend to be too conservative--waiting for the stop sign to turn green etc. If that's accurate it could also mean stoned drivers are worse at avoiding the mistakes of others.
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.
They must have access to the full data distribution, right?
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.
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.
Jail time should also be considered too, for repeat offenders.
Cars are a weird sort of thing, where they both are the justification for a surveillance state and lots of monitoring, but we also have extremely lenient penalties. It's difficult for me to understand how the US arrived at our current set of laws.
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.
>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.
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.
Yes, it works. The state that I used to reside in has draconian DUI/Traffic laws, and not coincidentally low traffic death rates.
Driving with license revoked or suspended was a serious charge and resulted in impound of vehicle and mandatory jail time. Repeat offenders would have their vehicles seized.
DUI laws similarly brutal. 2nd time offenders faced potentially life-altering charges and penalties. Get into an accident with injury to another person while DUI? Huge jail time. Felony DUI results in permanent loss of driving privileges.
Speeding 20 over the limit? Enjoy your reckless driving charge which is as serious a dui charge.
I read that getting a license back after a 2nd dui carries and average cost of $50k. Getting 2 dui's within 10 years automatically bumped 2nd dui to felony....no more driving for you.
Lax driving laws and penalties do nothing more than get a lot of people killed.
Escalating punishments often tend to take the "1-3%" of the bad people out of society that cause all the crime.
Remember from recent history these people that had 34 arrests or 73 arrests and they're out murdering people?
I mean the serving as an example to the rest part. Has that ever worked?
I mean to your point, when someone is robbing a 7/11, in today's atmosphere, no - no they don't consider it because the punishment is fairly low. In Islamic countries, if you steal you will likely lose your hand (or your head). In those countries people REALLY do consider the consequences.
Now I'm not advocating for the second option there. Just something in between. (obviously a lot farther away than the second option).
If my choice is jail or relocate and find a new job and home in a city with passable public transit (even if its just the bus) I know which one I'd pick.
The problem is how do you enforce that though.
The modern world is so cat centric people would rather drive without a license than accept to live without a car. And until you can reliably catch and jail license-less drivers, the bet is worth it for them.
If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.
> If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.
1% is actually negligible, and would not have a deterrent effect. In fact I wouldn't even be surprised if the effective prosecution rate was somewhat higher than this already.
> I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication.
I live in a country (France) where this is still the case, and where driving crimes are the second source of jail time after drug trafficking, yet alcohol is still the #1 cause of death on the road, and an estimate 2% of people drive without a license after having lost it (and are responsible for ~5% of accidents).
Alcohol will likely always be a factor in the worst accidents. But France is doing something right because your fatal accident rate per capita is one third that of America's [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
It's not France in particular though, America is the outlier among developed nations. In fact France is a bit behind most other European nations (but not by much).
How much of a deterrent can the police possibly impose that would outweigh the deterrent for not driving illegally, which (in your country) is being starving and homeless?
The cops will never deter everyone from breaking the law, but they don't have to. They just need to deter a large enough % of the population to have a positive effect.
Driving while intoxicated is not a crime of desperation. Even celebrities are often caught for DUI despite being able to afford a full-time limo driver.
Most people who drive intoxicated have jobs and reputations they'd prefer to keep, and families at home they would rather not be separated from or have to explain an arrest to.
And to be clear, we can't solve all the problems with a single measure. I'd like to see not just better law enforcement, but also a social safety net that ensures nobody is ever starving or homeless.
The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
>But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
An anecdote related to me by a former (Florida) county sheriff's deputy answers that question:
Many police will stake out bars around closing time, awaiting the intoxicated to get behind the wheel so they can be stopped, breathalyzed and arrested.
However, patrons were aware of this and the deputy saw a patron leave, stumbling, drop their car keys several times, then get into their car and drive away.
When stopping said individual, the breathalyzer and field sobriety test showed the driver to be stone cold sober. As such, the deputy sent the driver on their way.
Returning to the bar parking lot, he found that all the other patrons had departed while he was wasting his time on the one sober person -- dubbed the "designated decoy."
I'm sure other variations are and have been in use in the US for a long time -- since most places don't have public transportation or reliable taxis.
The "cars first, public transit last, if at all" culture in most of the US makes the likelihood of DUI/DWI and crashes/injuries/fatalities much, much worse.
> The crime under discussion is not driving while intoxicated but driving without a license.
How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
And there's a large enough population for whom driving without a license is not a crime of desperation. In many places there _is_ a public transport alternative (even if its slow and crappy). I used to give a lift every day to a colleague who had lost his license. I enjoyed the company and he paid for my gas. Many people can make an arrangement like this.
> But if you're going to bring that up anyway, how are people supposed to get their car home from the bar in a place where the government hates public transport?
Having been in this position many times: take an Uber, then Uber back to get your car the next day and plan better (or don't drink) next time.
>How did these people lose their license in the first place? The most common reason is DUIs. Followed by multiple instances of reckless driving. People are less likely to lose their license to begin with if they know there will be real consequences.
When I was in college in Ohio, one of my suite mates had several DUI arrests. After the first, his license was suspended -- yet he was allowed to drive to/from work/school because public transportation was minimal. After the third DUI, he was sentenced to 30 days in jail -- served on the weekends so he could continue going to school without interruption -- and still drive his car to/from work/school.
I was flabbergasted by that. But I guess that's how things are often handled in places without public transportation. And more's the pity.
So, you're still refusing to discuss driving without a license, like the rest of us are talking about
Am I? The second paragraph is about how to get around legally if you don't have a license. First and third paragraphs are about not making the bad decisions that you get into that situation in the first place (prevention is better than cure). What am I missing?
This thread is about driving without a license, but from the perspective of enforcing the laws to keep unlicensed drivers (who are generally more dangerous) off the roads to make the community safer. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes its unrealistic to expect 100% of unlicensed drivers to stay off the road (for reasons you have outlined), there is a large enough % of unlicensed drivers for whom visible law enforcement would be a deterrent and that would at least be an improvement over today.
> "The modern world is so cat centric"
If only
>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.
I’m strongly in favor of exponential punishment with very light punishments for first offences. It allows fluke infractions or bad luck to go without being punished too hard, but severely punish the small anti-social group that brings the rest of society down with it. So maybe if you accidentally run a red light once it is a $10 ticket, but next time it is $100, and then $1000, and then $10000, and then $100000.
I'm in favor of escalating punishment, but it doesn't reset, it decays. Say 3 years with not tickets and it goes down one level.
That's fine as well. I just don't want to punish you for life for small infractions every once in a while. Humans make mistakes.
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!
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!
Most US states do, too. But people will drive without a license because it’s the only way to get to anywhere in most of the country. And I suspect we’re light on enforcement for the same reason.
"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)
> it turns out that they got dozens of speed camera tickets per year.
Are you saying you can legally keep driving despite dozens of speed camera tickets in a year, as long as you keep paying the fines?
That's wild.
Around here (Melbourne, Australia), you'd lose your licence very quickly. A single speeding ticket is a minimum of 3 points off your licence (of which you have 12), and bigger infringements lose more points. So at most you could speed 4 times, but probably fewer. And it takes a few years for the points to come back.
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.
France gets around that by assuming it's the car's owner's fault. If you were not driving the car during the infraction, the person driving the car must fill out a form saying he or she did and take the hit voluntarily.
If the car's owner is a company, the company must declare a default conductor for this purpose.
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.
> 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.
At the risk of hearing a depressing answer...why?
Because they set the speeds too low to raise revenue.
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.
Camera tickets are in a weird place legally. They might not be legal, because of the 6th ammendment and due process requirements, so states tread lightly. A light touch gets a lot of compliance and is most likely self-funding; enforcement by humans may be more effective for habitual violators, but you most likely can't have as much coverage and be self-funding.
If you had 30 speeding tickets issued in person, it would be a lot different than 30 speeding tickets issued by machine.
If they're talking about automated speed cameras I guess there's the problem of not being able to correlate the plate of the car with a particular human, a bill simply gets sent to the owner of the car, but maybe if we impounded cars at some point people wouldn't be loaning cars out to their licenseless friends
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.
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.
As the old saw about driving in NYC goes:
Green means 'Go!'
Yellow means 'Go faster!'
Red means 'The next six cars may go through the intersection.'
Okay, the third part is a little hyperbolic.
The above is from the 1980s and AFAICT (I've lived here nearly 60 years) not much has changed.
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.
The idea that organized retail theft is significant or "most" is a myth[1]
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/retail-theft-in-us-cities...
Ah as long as Brookings Institute tells me it's a myth, I'll ignore the people selling basic toiletries right outside of drug stores, or bike messengers riding with suspicious taped up bikes that are poorly suited for heavy city use, or the videos of people coming in as a group, loading the bags and making off in get-away cars. Ignore what's in front of you, or the fact that nearly a third of shoplifting can be tracked down to ~300 people. These people maybe just have really big families to feed!
But you might ask why are stores closing? Why is deodorant behind lock and key?
> Finally, corporate claims are not holding up to scrutiny, and are being used to close stores that are essential assets for many communities.
Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.
Don't believe what's right in front of your eyes.
Nothing to see.
Where does that ~300 people figure come from??
The Brookings institute is hardly a lefty rag - they're about as centrist/neoliberal capitalist as an institution comes.
> Ignore what's in front of you
Yes, the general advice is to look past specific notable anecdotes and try to identify actual data to validate whether your emotional experience of the world is reflective of the world or of you. In this case, the numbers suggest the problem is not the world, no matter how many videos you're seeing on TikTok or wherever.
A real problem for assessing truth in the modern world is that anything that happens anywhere is instantly available to you as a decontextualized short-form video, and it's your job as a responsible media consumer to understand that ten videos on your feed are not a trend outside your feed.
> Ah yes, evil corporations like to close stores and forgo profit for ... reasons.
No, they're not forgoing profits, they're choosing to close stores with lower levels of profits than they'd prefer and using retail theft as an excuse. It wouldn't be the first time and it sure won't be the last time that a business tries to deflect blame for its poor planning onto the rest of us.
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.
I have to deal with the same kind of bugs all day long, doesn't mean I get to refuse to do my job for years at a time until someone I like is voted into office.
Welcome to the reality of the Black Lives Matters protests.
They got what they wanted--fewer Blacks shot by the police. But that's because the police weren't being as aggressive in doing their job. Crime rates went up, the number of Blacks killed went up--fewer by cops being offset by more from other criminals.
And we see the result of bail reform. The old system was not good--for lesser offenses they were typically sentenced to time served. This amounts to skipping over the determining guilt part of "justice". But when they took action on that they didn't notice that that was what was actually keeping them off the streets. The justice system simply does not have remotely the capacity to actually prosecute as many crimes as they catch.
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 that walmart lost something, it's that it's a general menace to others, and if you do it once fine but if you do it 10 times you're out. Get them to leave the country, if execution is not your thing.
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?
And where does that suggest incorrect crime reporting for political reasons?
Your article is just another version of pretending disparate outcomes is proof of discrimination. Totally wrong, but not what you say it's saying.
Are you saying the article must suggest it for it to be evidence of???
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.
Read it again. They didn't say the middle lane was a turn lane.
Nobody said he did. He said the RIGHT lane was a TURN LANE. Which means the lane to the left of it could count on the people TURNING, not going straight.
WTF, YOU made the comment: "If the right lane goes straight"
You might as well say, "if the people on the opposite side of the road cross the median..."
That would be the lane for turning, yes?
Yep. Which is why "If the right lane goes straight" doesn't make sense. We've already established that the right lane does NOT go straight, because it's a turn lane.
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.
There’s no reliable way to determine impairment from a blood test. At most, this says that ~42% of people used it recently and/or frequently enough for metabolites to be present.
https://forensicresources.org/2021/marijuana-impairment-faq/
Sure, but if the baseline level of annual usage is only 20% in the general population then you still have a significant correlation.
Correlation, and about a billion compounding factors.
For example: younger people are more likely to be regular cannabis users - and are also more likely than the general public to get in motor vehicle accidents.
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...
DUI enforcement is CA is really poor:
https://calmatters.org/investigation/2025/12/california-road...
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.
'Entertain me better or I'll drive distracted' is a distorted view on your responsibility as the controller of a two ton missile.
I don't like ads either, but that doesn't excuse my responsibility to drive safely for the betterment of myself and my community.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonymy
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
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
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 got a dog during COVID and I'm not sure if this is a related issue but the number of times I've had people not brake but accelerate as we're crossing the street or flash their high beams or try to drive around us at the last moment is insane.
there are days where it happens multiple times during one walk and weeks where it happens at least each day of the week.
i'm actually a car guy but when i drive if i see any pedestrians i always slow down and i take it even easier if i see they have small children or dogs since either can randomly stop or dart away.
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.
I think the truth is more boring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeaHOe7eviQ
Cause there are fewer police watching and there are no consequences for these people's actions.
If you have ever driven in Ohio the driving behavior is absurdly different than what you see in places like CA. People rarely speed. They willingly let you cut them off. And there are reasons for that too. Here is a map of where you are most likely to get a speeding ticket (1). The only place in california I've seen any enforcement of speeding or traffic behavior is along the 395 corridor in the Owens valley. Incidentally this region comes up in the map. It simply does not happen in LA county at least. Well, maybe they slap a speed ticket onto a pursuit case on top of everything else. But no sit and wait radar taking that I've seen.
1. https://i.redd.it/f898arvdx6je1.jpeg
> 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.
Non-scientific anecdote here but I feel like the lawlessness is due to lack of enforcement for traffic violations vs an uptick in weed usage. Possibly covid scrambled our brains and promotes aggressive impulsive behavior. Maybe cops are afraid to pull people over because they might inadvertently shoot them and become a national news story. Maybe the adoption of big trucks makes people feel invincible (two distinct trucks on my drive have cut in line at a left turn lane with a red arrow and crossed 2 lanes opposing traffic at different lights, what would possess someone to do that(?))
Whatever the cause I feel in my gut that if our police did basic standards enforcement people would think twice about lawlessness. I’m in Pennsylvania.
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!
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.
That's genuinely frightening and possibly explains a lot about people on the road these days.
Everyone I know, a pretty successful group of people, have no qualms driving when stoned.
Serum levels of THC do not correlate with degree of impairment. It's not linear, like alcohol.
I thought this was common knowledge among physicians who have studied the subject.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect
Can you explain what you mean by this?
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.
> This is again THC apologizism, nobody would even begin to suggest this if we were talking about alcohol.
This is literally how safe legal limits were derived.
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?
Whenever you think to yourself "People couldnt be that stupid, right?" read this study and plan accordingly.
>The rate of drivers who tested positive for THC did not change significantly before or after legalization (42.1% vs. 45.2%), indicating that legal status did not influence the behavior of those who chose to drive after use.
That being the case, I'm not sure what the policy prescription should be here, if any.
> 103 drivers (41.9%) overall tested positive for THC, with yearly rates ranging from 25.7% to 48.9%.
The statistics for this seem suspect at best, I'll believe it once it's peer reviewed
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730
Anybody who's smoked a lot of weed knows that THC tolerance works very differently from alcohol tolerance. If you've been ripping dabs every couple hours for the last month, you might be well above the legal limit and barely feel different at all. On the other hand, if you haven't smoked in a year and take a single hit of a modern joint, you could be floored.
I'm not sure how THC intoxication could be measured, but blood THC concentration feels like an incredibly crude metric compared to BAC.
Smoking weed is terrible for you. Either drink or do psychedelics.
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.
Hmm, that last sentence is really missing a "refuse to"
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.
There's a lot of different ways to measure crime, making it hard to compare between nations.
The people who try anyway, mostly put the USA as fairly middling, nothing special either way.
> We have world-leading criminality rates.
That's what happens when you use criminalization and penal slavery to replace chattel slavery.
Progressive love to repeat this, but it doesn't make it true.
> Progressive love to repeat this, but it doesn't make it true.
Conservatives love to deny this, but it doesn't make it false. That criminalization was an immediate, direct substitute for chattel slavery is extensively documented, and that the patterns of criminalization used for that purpose became culturally entrenched and spread (even where the particular practices on top of that served to make it a replacement for chattel slavery, like convict leasing, generally did not in their original form beyond the South, though commercial exploitation of coerced prison labor did become a widespread national phenomenon, even though there has been some winding back in some jurisdictions of that particular practice in recent years.)
> 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.
Somehow every part of this paragraph just keeps getting less correct.
America doesn't have "world-leading" criminality by literally any metric you care to choose.
Even if it did, also having world leading incarceration rates might make a rational, scientific type fellow wonder about how those could both be true!
Also, those are not in fact the only alternatives. It's not even difficult to think of more than those two. Have you even tried?
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.
>An average level of 30.7 ng/mL generally means those people must have consumed marijuana at some time close to driving.
Averages do not work that way! The average of 48, 48, 48, 3 and 3 is 30. The study findings remain interesting but the actual proportion of impaired drivers may be less than 40%.
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%.
50% of fatalities are from the 8% of the driving population that refuses to wear a seatbelt.
https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-topics/seat-be...
I have a friend that's a mechanic.
He says that he gets cars in that reek so bad, he can smell them from three bays away.
I suspect that we'll soon be seeing a rapid "pullover-test," and that will probably knock that stuff down.
It will be interesting to read the actual study when it comes out.
Interesting questions: * What is the baseline of consumption / THC level?
* what was the alcohol level in decesased drivers ? (e..g how many people only had alcohol, how many only THC, how many had both, how many had nothing.
* Are there other test scenarios where THC screening is mandatory that could help getting to the baseline ? Are there ways to get an approximate answer from sewers, like they did for Covid?
> 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.
This paper would need to go into way more detail to be at all useful.
40% is a staggering number, which makes me suspect that all it measures is Montgomery County police's pretty good track record for deciding when to test someone for THC during an autopsy
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.
If you do an adequate job of looking for confounders you'll likely torpedo the study because it will turn out to be something already known.
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...
Does anyone else constantly smell weed while driving around? Several times per week I find myself behind a car that wreaks so bad of weed that I can clearly smell it driving a few car lengths behind. I have to wonder…if so many people are smoking enough to smell it in another car while moving, exactly how many people on the road are high?
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.
There sure is, when the survey question boils down to "have you committed a Federal crime?"
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...
I have it on good authority and a lot of data that over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for recently having (i) breathed air containing oxygen, (ii) drank tap water (iii) were wearing shoes, (iv) had used those shoes to get to the car, ...
I saw this and it was too funny:
“Unaffected by legalisation” - so at least there’s more proof than outlawing drugs doesn’t work.
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.Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving simulator, and measure their performance?
Kind of a bad test since people know the goal is to drive well, most accident happen when people are complacent.
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.
You wouldn't expect sober people to be more likely to die.
I remember reading that in an accident with one party intoxicated and the other not, the intoxicated party is more likely to survive because they are more relaxed and can take an impact better. But of course sober people are less likely to get into single car fatality causing accidents I'm sure.
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 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.
Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45494730
Don't be so judgemental, dying is traumatic! Who wouldn't want a little somethin' to take the edge off?
The sign of a brittle system is constant feeling to restrict user freedom
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.
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).
As far as my experience goes, yes. I can tell by the scent. And actually at stoplights I can smell it even with windows rolled up.
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.
Just that you see it more doesn't necessarily mean it happens more
That could mean that THC is not causative, just coincidence.
I need to know the rates in the general driving population before I can assume driving high is dangerous.
That may mean a lot of things. Maybe non-smokers got good at eliminating people who recently smoked.
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?
It is entirely possible THC is more dangerous for vehicle safety than alcohol and that wouldn’t surprise me. But based on this study alone? No.
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.
Phones are by far the biggest source of dangerous driving.
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The push for marijuana normalization has been one of the stupidest things in recent memory. It's a drug as harmful as alcohol or nicotine if misused.
Cant wait for this tissue-thin abstract to drive weeks and years of anti-cannabis nonsense.
I bet 100% of them had been drinking water recently.
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.
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.
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…).
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.
> 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.
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
Impairment is somewhat orthogonal to drug or alcohol intoxication. It's not safe to drive if you've been awake for 24+ hours, for example, or have some other medical condition (hypoglycemia, whatever) that impairs your ability to drive safely.
This has nothing to do with "intoxication" or sleep deprivation, or medical conditions. Some police will lie and charge people with "DUI" when there is zero justification, and they ruin lives because too many of them are sadistic assholes. It's in epidemic in Tennessee and other parts of the country, but it really could happen anywhere to anyone. Police unions are a problem, and taxpayers pay for the litigation when someone actually fights back against false charges.
So what? This line of argument can be used to dismiss essentially any crime, because police can always lie about whatever the particular crime is. It's not a principled reason not to have laws or enforce them.
Glad to know you're perfectly fine with lives being ruined for no reason at all.
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"
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.
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.