The -most important- subject about Marijuana nowadays, is about being arrested by smoking a joint. I do think.
It's a great thing that we have authorities, but we chase for a better concept for what is 'legal'.
So, while the "opioid deaths" may not have "fall following marijuana legalization" (In Colorado), the world does have great news about the legalization itself.
FYI this is a dangerous line of reasoning - it can be used to support whatever outcome one desires.
If we can provide good research and complete facts, we should go out of our way to do it, rather than do some hand waving and accept all research that appears to support our claims.
I see where you're coming from, but just some food for thought.
Quick edit: It seems like I’ve been misunderstood - I was referring to the line of reasons being dangerous, not pot. Not sure how that happened since it’s the first line in my post.
Do you mean "proof itself is dangerous"? If so can you elaborate, I'm not sure a sound argument can be made to support that claim but I'd love to hear it if it does exist.
This is the kind of poor correlative thinking that created the spurious war on drugs. Morally, you have to draw the line at what is "dangerous", when the danger emerges from a complex behavioral scenario.
Some drug is vilified as a lampshade, because a physical substance is considered easier to control than irresponsible behavior. There is a diminishing return for prohibition that is hard to cost-benefit justify at any scale. e.g. the substance can create revenue outside of prohibition. This is the core error in the prescriptive "war on drugs" and decades later it's still confounding audiences as to why it's an incorrect conclusion.
The punishment severity of drug offenses is something to look at (the inverse relationship between drug offenses recorded and severity of punishment). This has nothing to do with the danger of the drug itself, but does address the behavior more directly. "Treatment" for addiction is still in the dark ages as many debunkers study this topic routinely. If you chase that topic, you might see how consequence is the stick, not blaming the inanimate substance.
I lean towards marijuana being a possible cause of the increase in bad driving but I can also see the huge influx of outsiders being another potential cause. People new to an area tend it make a lot more mistakes on the road.
If there's a huge influx of outsiders, then that alone would increase traffic accidents without needing to appeal to drugs as the culprit. The OP seems to be looking a little too hard to fit data to his beliefs.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no reliable way to test whether a driver is actively intoxicated from pot. Existing blood tests will tell you if a person has used it in the past week or two, but not whether they've used it in the past hour.
So average measured blood-levels could well be up because more Coloradans are smoking, but that's no proof at all that more Coloradans are driving under the influence.
I wouldn't necessarily say that weed is harmless or safer than alcohol, but articles like the Denver Post one are written with an unfair bias.
> To the best of my knowledge, there is no reliable way to test whether a driver is actively intoxicated from pot
Police here use a spit test; supposedly it reveals use within the past 24 hours. But as far as I know, it can/will test positive for a regular user that did not smoke weed in the past 24 hours.
So I guess you are right; it is not reliable (but it'll still get you convicted..)
I believe gravypod is referring to previous years in the graph that starts the article. For instance, look at the 2008-2012 period. There is a definite downward trend.[0]
Yes, exactly. To prove a correlation, in my opinion, one would need....
1. More smoothed/averaged dataset (centered rolling average ~4 months?)
2. Explain the other extreme dips in this graph (2005, 2007, 2011)
3. Plot similar data from other states (with and without legal marijuana)
4. Investigate other causes (see sparrish's comment)
It's a great thing that we have authorities, but we chase for a better concept for what is 'legal'.
So, while the "opioid deaths" may not have "fall following marijuana legalization" (In Colorado), the world does have great news about the legalization itself.