Yep which is why both camps come up with different statistics. Neither are lying they are just being selective of what they are measuring.hanelyp wrote:Sounds like a cannabis user would be far more likely to have a traffic collision than an unimpaired driver, driving at a speed greatly different from the natural flow, but far less likely for a given collision to result in fatalities. Gives the pot advocate some wiggle room in selecting the statistics they quote.palladin9479 wrote:Yep, cannabis intoxication results in an effect of extremely slowness. They do ever thing much slower, they talk slower, walk slower and drive slower. Half the speed limit or less slower. ...
Being impaired, by any substance, will increase automobile accident rate. "Accident" covers everything from a fender bender at 10mph to running someone over at 80mph. So we need to whittle that category down some to get a more accurate picture. What you see is cannabis having a higher rate of non-fatal accidents in comparison to an unimpaired driver, which makes sense when you consider their reaction speed has been slowed to a crawl. They actually have a lower rate of fatal accidents, which again makes sense seeing as the lethality of an accident is directly correlated with the speed of impact (total kinetic force involved) and someone impaired with cannabis would be driving with less kinetic force then a regular drive and significantly less kinetic force then an ethanol impaired driver. In all cases we don't want impaired drivers on our roads and as such cannabis would be covered under existing DUI laws the same as prescription medication (there are some medications you aren't allowed to drive or operate machinery for a period after it's consumption). The argument that there would be this huge rash of traffic fatalities if cannabis were legal is unfounded and doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Personally I'm for cannabis legalization and regulation by the ATF the same as our other two popular recreational substances, alcohol and tobacco. My reasoning is that a substance should not be prohibited unless it can be demonstrated to be a grave threat to public health. As the pharmacology of cannabis is well understood and it's been demonstrated to be less harmful then ethanol and less addictive then both nicotine and ethanol, it's illogical for alcohol and tobacco to be legal while cannabis is not. Additionally there is a financial gain to be made by making the already existing market for recreational cannabis a legalized and well regulated one. This will remove the profits from illegal non tax paying violent drug cartels and transfer them to the coffers of legal tax paying non violent private industry. This should be a financial conservatives wet dream.
Of course if someone is a religious democrat, well nothing can be done to save them from their own stupidity.