I have DEFINITELY noticed an increase in public usage yeah. Which is strange because that was not legalized in Ohio. Smoking a joint in your car going down the road or at the park is as illegal as it ever was.

I’m sure overall usage numbers are up because I know a lot of people who started using it after they could buy it legally, but those people are all also infrequent users and I’m sure are not driving high. The people who would be deterred by weed being illegal are probably all in the “won’t drive stoned” category. (I’m sure many infrequent users pre-legalization, myself included, were never much worried about the legality but don’t drive high because we like being alive, and we continue to not do so now.)

I've never smelled cannabis before in my life and don't know what it's supposed to smell like. I live in an area of the world where it's illegal and I guess not many people are smoking it. I may also have had a quite sheltered education.

This year, I went to British Columbia, and there was this weird scent everywhere that I could not describe. My wife said it was cannabis. I'm still not used to it so I don't know if I'll be able to recognize it next time I travel to North America.

I had never smelled it before. It smells identical to sewer gas to me—I know what that smells like because our house was missing several drain traps.

The first time I smelt weed it reminded me of a skunk.

I could see how that might be mistaken as sewage.

As somebody who has no problem whatsoever with weed, it smells like pus from a tooth infection to me.

I have had dental abscesses in the past that made my mouth taste like I was in a room full of cannabis smoke.

Living in proximity to people who don't care enough to not be annoying to others has a few ways you can look at it. But I suggest you consider upgrading the cabin air filter in your car. There are likely options with activated carbon to help reduce odors. This was actually a factor in my decision to go Tesla: their models S and X have an additional massive HEPA filter, and absolutely no outside smells make it into the car.

These horror-style anecdotes are hilarious echoes from decades past.

oh no, he had the reefer madness?

Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?

It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.

2. young people are worse drivers and more likely to use

The expected number seems to be about 20+% (depending on assumptions) so this is higher than expected but not drastically so.

Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.

Right, so it might just mean that reckless drivers are more likely to smoke weed.

It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.

The second seems eminently plausible with the correlation between driving skills and drug use both being due to higher risk tolerance.

You need to consider other confounding factors

It is well shown that age (youth) is a major factor in accident rates.

Not necessarily, they could both be a comorbidity of some other factor (bad decision making causes both, for instance) but it certainly doesn’t refute it.

The question then becomes "what level of impairment is tolerable".

Driving doesn't require perfect cognition, just good enough. If we went for perfect then anyone over 65 would be banned from operating a car.

And I think that's the hard thing with THC. Yes you may be impaired 24 hours later, but how impaired and how does that compare to age related impairment.

You're only expected to crash 500 or so times per 100 million miles as the base rate[0]. If you were impaired enough to have 2x or 3x the risk of crashing then it's entirely possible that you wouldn't crash, or that other factors would play a larger role.

[0] https://www.friedmansimon.com/faqs/how-common-are-car-accide...

You probably are compared to your baseline self (another comment goes more extensively on this subject) but maybe you have enough driving skills and common sense to minimize the risks somewhat.

Planning, good sense, and caution go a long way to compensate for physical impairment. Weed is different from booze in that booze increases risk taking, which makes driving such a danger. But that doesn’t mean weed doesn’t impair in some material way compared to baseline.

Being freshly high is probably 2 quick beers, I'd think I was baseline after maybe 45 minutes. A massive edible might be 5, and I'd take like 3 hours I'd guess.

Alcohol is so much more impairing. I think just being a daily user isn't the issue. It's the proximity to last use and obviously quantity.

Dairy is a category that depending on context may or may not include eggs. In this case the distinction doesn’t matter. Vegans wouldn’t have experience with strictly defined dairy or eggs.

For some reason, people lump eggs in with dairy, presumably because they're unaware of the difference between hens and cows. You'd have to have quite a lot of detectable THC in your system to confuse the two, but here we are, people think that eggs are the same as milk.

To be fair, my milkman delivers eggs as well as milk, cream, and butter, but they come from a totally different farm.

You think 40% of the population is using? That seems like a pretty big reach to me.

> There’s also an association with having drank water and been in a car crash

This is blatantly intellectually dishonest. If 100% of people drink water then it’s not surprising when 100% of people in car crashes have been drinking water.

If less than 40% of the population has impairment levels of THC at any given time but 40% of deceased car crash drivers have impairment levels of THC in their blood, you can’t pretend that THC use is equivalent to drinking water.

The mental gymnastics being done in this thread to try to ignore this study are fascinating.

Enough with the pedantry please:

"Driving under the influence of cannabis was associated with a significantly increased risk of motor vehicle collisions compared with unimpaired driving (odds ratio 1.92 (95% confidence interval 1.35 to 2.73); P=0.0003); we noted heterogeneity among the individual study effects (I2=81)".

From https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e536

Less coughing and effects of smoke, but the burnout is definitely due to daily THC, even if you vape it or do dabs.

(To be clear, I don't think every daily user is a burnout.)

That's probably not the thing to tell a parent whose kid just made a dent and a black smudge on a MachE. I don't want to over index on the "think of the kids" argument, but we don't take driving seriously enough. Wikipedia says:

    Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of preventable death for people aged 5–22, and the second most common cause for ages 23–67.

Sure.. I just was addressing the goal makes sense that drivers are not impaired. Of course nobody is perfect.

I borderline want a conscription-style policy, where young adults are required to live in Boston, Philadelphia, NYC, DC, Seattle, or Chicago, car-free for a year. Americans’ inability to even imagine a world where a car isn’t the way to get around is really a problem.

I don't think you understand what "inherently dangerous" actually means.

FYI murder requires intent, otherwise it is just manslaughter. Your indoctrination is showing by your turns of phrase.