Why speculate? That would be measurable.

That the study was done at all is the more incredible finding.

I work in CO in the medical research field. Frankly, getting funding for ANY type of weed study is near impossible. Absolutely no federal funds can be used, including your laptop and desk, let alone any lab space just to store paper or pipettes. The docs at the new VA are at wit's end with the weed ban. They can barely prescribe anything due to the churn-rate of the VA, and then the vets literally just go across the street and buy lots of cheap weed. Anecdotally, the docs say that the vets that use weed tend to be a lot better off, mentally, than the ones that don't. But we can't study it at all because there is no money.

Also, in CO, there has been an increase in severe head injuries that tracks pot usage very well, or so I hear from researchers doing their own thing on the side. Why? No idea whatsoever. But research will never see the light of day until we can get funding for it, as other priorities will always take over, since, you know, they get paid to do that instead.

While this is true, there are quite a few stories, where heroine users write about becoming clean with the use of cannabis. Just search https://www.reddit.com/r/trees and see for yourself if you doubt that.

Also, if you have the numbers of calls to ambulance, you might see a drop there too. But maybe that's also not enough evidence for you.

No, it's not. It's very dangerous to draw correlations like these(i.e. see all the "crime going down"/"crime going up" explanations) because of the huge potential for noise; it's not like we only take one societal decision per year to be able to measure its actual effects.

> But maybe that's also not enough evidence for you.

Anecdotes should not be used to create policy.

If people are heavily addicted to heroin, I find it very hard to believe they haven't also been smoking cannabis. 100% of the heroin users I've known have all smoked.

All who have tried to come off it numerous times have tried a plethora of ways o deal with withdrawl, cannabis may help to an extent but only to a small extent

Marijuana has been good enough to prove itself without studies. So the more studies you have, the better. I believe.

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.

I'm all in.

Prove itself dangerous. Just some food for thought ;)

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.

There's a nice link in the article for how dangerous it is. http://www.denverpost.com/2017/08/25/colorado-marijuana-traf...

I live in Colorado, I've seen a definite decrease in safe driving the past few years. It is dangerous.

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..)

Just like alcohol is dangerous.

Precautions must be made, I agree with you. But this looks like all drugs must be included in the next studies, and articles.