Thanks for the comment. Maybe I am reading it wrong, but what you described sounds rather reasonable to me. After all, marijuana does impair one's ability to drive[0]. The traffic laws may be a bit draconian but I find it hard to argue against it in principle.
To give you a related, and hopefully less political example: People who suffer from epilepsy in my country are technically disqualified from driving for 12 months after a major seizure. In that event their affliction is probably not controlled by medicine and there is a chance that they might start seizing behind the wheel.
An unintended consequence of the law is that epileptics would go to great lengths to hide the extent of their condition for the fear of losing their driving priviledge. It's not uncommon for epileptics to lie to doctors, or even refuse to go to a hospital after an ambulance has been called for them, just so an episode could remain off the book.
Some might be doing it for vain reasons, but there is also a good number of patients who cannot afford to lose their license as their job security may depend on it. The balance between public safety and personal freedom is never easy.
> Thanks for the comment. Maybe I am reading it wrong, but what you described sounds rather reasonable to me. After all, marijuana does impair one's ability to drive[0]. The traffic laws may be a bit draconian but I find it hard to argue against it in principle.
I do agree that driving while high, or shortly after, is not a good idea.
The problem is that smoking with any regularity at all is effectively illegal, regardless of how sober you are when you're stopped, and the punishment is ridiculously heavy.
I mainly used the example in response to the earlier comment ("Before I start, it's important to point out that in a authoritarian state like China, laws are often deliberately made very strict but only loosely enforced."). Specifically when it comes to driving and weed, I'm definitely in favor of some regulation, similar to how we treat alcohol and driving.
I agree this is quite a problem, and not fair. But, what alternative do the police have? Refuse to arrest people for driving while high, because they have no test for it?
I don't mean this rhetorically: it seems that we have to err in one direction or the other until we come up with a better test. What do you think?
A saliva test is decently accurate as a first pass to detect smoking in the past 48 hours or so. A blood test is more accurate, but can have 'positive' result for chronic smokers even if they've not smoked for weeks or months.
The problem is rather that unlike alcohol, 1) there's no matter of degrees and the cut-off point for testing 'positive' is extremely low, plus the punishment is unusually high, especially when compared to alcohol which provably impairs driving significantly (and almost certainly more severely than weed). And 2), contrary to all other drugs, the 'evidence' of smoking is stored in your body's fat, which means you can test positive even if you've not smoked in a long time (and are almost certainly not driving-impaired).
To give you a related, and hopefully less political example: People who suffer from epilepsy in my country are technically disqualified from driving for 12 months after a major seizure. In that event their affliction is probably not controlled by medicine and there is a chance that they might start seizing behind the wheel.
An unintended consequence of the law is that epileptics would go to great lengths to hide the extent of their condition for the fear of losing their driving priviledge. It's not uncommon for epileptics to lie to doctors, or even refuse to go to a hospital after an ambulance has been called for them, just so an episode could remain off the book.
Some might be doing it for vain reasons, but there is also a good number of patients who cannot afford to lose their license as their job security may depend on it. The balance between public safety and personal freedom is never easy.
[0]:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/600655/