Re:In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization
by aggie on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @02:20PM
(#11161531)
Detecting intoxication is a problem, but how is that different from before legalization? If someone was smoking illegally before, you still wouldn't be able to determine if they were driving stoned. Unless you're saying any amount of weed in their system should result in a DUI, even if it could have been from a week ago.
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Re:In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization
by keypusher on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @04:44PM
(#11162596)
The illegality of the stubstance gave police an excuse to search the car, or to intimidate the driver into implicitly consenting to a search of the car, during which they inevitably find something the stoner or one of their friends forgot which leads to an arrest. I've seen it play out on COPS dozens of times.
I wonder why they don't go back to doing a sobriety test for detecting intoxication though. It worked ok before breathalyzers, if you can pass the test than presumably you are ok to drive.
Re:In Colorado, a look at life after marijuana legalization
by aggie on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @05:21PM
(#11162843)
One study found a field sobriety test to correctly classify impaired driving state due to THC 65-75% of the time [1]. The chance of a false positive seems too high to me given the harsh penalty of a DUI. Field sobriety tests have been shown to be ~91-94% reliable for alcohol impairment [2].
1 - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0379073804... 2 - http://hfs.sagepub.com/content/48/3/608.short