Posted on 08/08/2014 1:36:04 PM PDT by Mariner
Since Colorado voters legalized pot in 2012, prohibition supporters have warned that recreational marijuana will lead to a scourge of “drugged divers” on the state’s roads. They often point out that when the state legalized medical marijuana in 2001, there was a surge in drivers found to have smoked pot. They also point to studies showing that in other states that have legalized pot for medical purposes, we’ve seen an increase in the number of drivers testing positive for the drug who were involved in fatal car accidents. The anti-pot group SAM recently pointed out that even before the first legal pot store opened in Washington state, the number of drivers in that state testing positive for pot jumped by a third.
The problem with these criticisms is that we can test only for the presence of marijuana metabolites, not for inebriation. Metabolites can linger in the body for days after the drug’s effects wear off — sometimes even for weeks. Because we all metabolize drugs differently (and at different times and under different conditions), all that a positive test tells us is that the driver has smoked pot at some point in the past few days or weeks.
It makes sense that loosening restrictions on pot would result in a higher percentage of drivers involved in fatal traffic accidents having smoked the drug at some point over the past few days or weeks. You’d also expect to find that a higher percentage of churchgoers, good Samaritans and soup kitchen volunteers would have pot in their system. You’d expect a similar result among any large sampling of people. This doesn’t necessarily mean that marijuana caused or was even a contributing factor to accidents, traffic violations or fatalities.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Did you actually read the article?
Yup. Said all that "data" came from a survey of high school students. I remember High School. I would certainly put a great deal of stock in a survey that the Nerd and Preppy kids filled out about their pot usage which may or may not be true.
As I mentioned, I doubt the stoners even bothered to fill it out.
Now if you had mandatory blood analysis of the THC levels in this same body of students, then you might be able to conclude something accurate.
But why should we be interested in accurate data on a topic such as this? The advocates will jump on six months worth of proxy data that may or may not represent anything, and they will declare themselves right.
Usually sh!t is born sh!t.
Well perhaps you've led a sheltered life. How wonderful for you. Not all of us start out with silver spoons in our mouths.
Last I checked you don't get a vote in what I "have" to do and I'm sure not going to award you one.
Oh you are welcome to be as moon bat inconsistent as you like, but if you are going to embrace an inconsistent philosophical idea (My drugs are okay, but other people's drugs are not) then you might as well let us know up front so we won't waste any time paying attention to your opinion.
Actually this is the direction I have been leaning towards you from the start. You simply don't strike me as a high tension thinker, and you haven't disabused me of that impression yet.
Traffic on some of the highways in CO has radically decreased because of the economic decline, fuel prices (still high on the Range), gun control, etc. Also, most of the traffic consists of small cars again, so more of the drivers are more cautious. Police are also watching potheads on the highways and keeping their ears open for word of pothead drivers from gas station/convenience store proprietors (big revenues from pothead car stops).
I don’t really know the methodology, there was a link to it on one of these threads. I suppose if you were designing such a study, you could start with people who don’t use it, and have them do something that requires physical and mental coordination. Then you give them x amount of THC and test them again. Presumably they would be impaired. Then repeat that over time and see if they perform better on he drug as time goes on.
I would rather treat 10 million drug addicts than pay for imprisoning 5 million.
Would you hire them?
My guess is that ‘road rage’ is dimished with those who are high...they can just wave it off and chill out until the light changes....lol Speeding has slowed as they really are trying not to mess up....oy vey....just speculating here.
“I’m guessing you live in California, or perhaps Further up the coast. Sometimes just being in the right place at the right time can change your fortunes for the better.”
No. I live in Texas. I do travel around 150 days a year.
“I bet I have a wider range of social ladder than do you. I’ve seen the gutter and the Manor house. I know millionaires and paupers.”
Maybe, but I kind of tend to doubt it.
I get a similar spread from my work.
Colorado is a national embarrassment bump for later...
I swear, sometimes I think Free Republic could rival DU when it comes to the number of reefer fiends. I make no apologies for my feelings on this subject.
It is my understanding that the most prominent question that most young drives in Colorado have to ask is:
Dude, Where’s My Car?
So statistical significance is measured by time? Interesting. How long a time period will yield statistically significant conclusions?
Well I can tell you 60 years certainly yielded sufficient conclusions in the case of China. At needle park (Platzspitz Switzerland) it only took a few years.
Irrelevant evasions and a big graphic - very impressive.
No, you can't answer it and so you dismiss it.
It was irrelevant to the topic we'd been discussing - see the first line above. The answer to my question is: no, statistical significance is NOT measured by time ... it's measured by number of data points, and even then there's no one single number that implies statistical significance in all cases. So not only was your statement, "Six months is too small of a sample to draw any meaningful conclusions" not right - it was so stupid it wasn't even wrong.
Now as to your new topic:
The Platzspitz experiment was a test of YOUR IDEAS. They failed miserably.
No, legalization in a single small park wasn't the idea of anybody except the nitwits who implemented it; hyperconcentrating a region's drug sellers and users had the readily foreseeable consequences.
Legalized Opium was a much larger and much wider test of YOUR IDEAS. They failed massively.
A closer test was what happened in THIS COUNTRY in the same timeframe when opium and other drugs were legal - the answer is: nothing like what happened in China.
My quick skim says he’s using the legalization for medical purposes in 2001 as the dividing line, not the recreational legalization.
And finding that lies aren’t cutting it you run to insults. Nobody that defends the WOD can stand on facts. You just proved yourself wrong. Again.
>OK, chilren, let’s do some math. Pothead hippies take over the arts, media, academia and two generations later, conservatives find their butts getting kicked, scratching their heads and wondering if they really are obsolete.
>>And if you think Pot did all that then you aren’t knowledgeable enough or intelligent enough to bother arguing with. I don’t think you believe that, but you felt the need to throw that out there as a cheap shot.
We have had our butts kicked in a low intensity cultural conflict, the shape of which we never saw coming, had no defense for and with analyses such as yours (money...shuh!) will continue to piss and moan about liberal control of cultural organs of media dissemination without a clue about what to do. Do I have to draw a graph line for you from Chuck Berry to the Berkeley Free Speech movement, through the Summer of Love, the drug sex rock counterculture through the liberal paradigm shift in the American ethos? Are you really that blind? Do you know who Chuck Berry is? The fuel of that counterculture was literally and effectively cannabis, period. It continues to be.
>>I could probably write a 20 page essay on what social changes occurred to create the liberal dominance of the media and academia. The prime factor is money, not pot. Money Liberalizes. After World War II, the United States became the most prosperous nation on Earth. That and other factors fueled the rise of Liberalism after the war. (And not the least of which was the development of sound and image recording systems which allowed heretofore lowly regarded Libertine “Actors” to have far more power and influence.)
Your “money” gambit is nothing more than a set of blinders. What are you saying- that the American Dream destroyed America? Suddenly in 1964, a generation after WWII, personal wealth corrupted our youth? Strange all that wealth failed to turn America’s captains of industry into liberals ages ago, if wealth liberalizes. The Communist Internationale had nothing to do with this?
>Two pothead phone phrackers invent the personal computer and here we are typing messages on Free Republic.
>>I didn’t see Steve Jobs doing a hell of a lot of “inventing” other than new marketing schemes. His talent was sales, not development. I think it was Wozniak that did the lion’s share of the “inventin.”
Try to get the point, will you...the radical counterculture- Viet Nam War era potheads of every type and description took over, not only academia and media, but every other type and description of enterprise from Ben & Jerry’s to Virgin Records to Virgin Airways. Have you ever heard the term “thinking out of the box”? The “evils” of cannabis, and more importantly, cannabis based cultural domination, has proven itself to be economically viable in a dog eat dog competitive economic game board. Did I mention “thinking outside the box” yet? Cannabis culture changed the way America conceives itself and the world. Key term: low intensity cultural conflict. Google “Antonio Gramsci” and wake up.
>>Now I just did a search for Steve Wozniak and “Pot” and also “Marijuana” and pretty much every return I looked at said Jobs smoked pot and LSD, but I never did find anything saying the Woz did. Maybe he did and I just haven’t found it yet, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be a prominent aspect of his life.
>>I will also point out that Woz is still alive, and Jobs is dead. Apparently killed by his nutty idea of being a “fruitarian.”
You’ll be debating the merits of marching to the front in uban camo vs. suburban camo while their tanks turn the village into matchsticks.
That's OK.
But my position, IMHO is more nuanced.
Marijuana has achieved the status in our culture once reserved only for alcohol. And it deserves the same legal recognition as a result.
It's "embedded". And the expenditure of a single dime to eliminate it is foolhardy.
According to Gallup, 38% of Americans have smoked it and 52% favor it's full legalization.
Despite the protestations of the scared and the do-gooders. The scared will adjust, the do-gooders will move on to something else. And the state will stop disrupting the lives of it's citizenry because they choose to self-medicate.
Then there's the hard-core WOD folks. I won't pretend to understand their motives. I'm sure some are well-meaning and some just want to control others.
But they'll be pushed aside and society will proceed without them.
We are constantly quoting statistics that show crime rates as being higher in counties with the strictest gun control laws and lower in counties where it is much easier for citizens to own and bear guns.
I think those statistics are accurate and effectively make the argument that gun control actually increases crime because it restricts the law-abiding from defending themselves, giving the criminals a safe haven in which to operate.
Well, if it turns out that legalizing pot decreases highway fatalities (even if the true reason is that everybody is too stoned to go anywhere), then I say let them have their pot and let the rest of us have our guns.
I took the liberty of editing your post.
You twice called me a liar. Don't really see any point in trying to reason with you. Might as well just use insults.
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