Cruising on Cannabis
Cruising on Cannabis: Putting the Breaks on Doped Driving Misconceptions
By Paul Armentano
Moreover, emerging scientific research indicates that cannabis actually has far less impact on the psychomotor skills needed for driving than alcohol does, and is seldom a causal factor in automobile accidents. A pair of international studies released in the spring of 2001 bolsters this argument.
The first, conducted by Britain's Transport Research Laboratory, found that volunteers performed better on a driving simulator under the influence of pot than they did after consuming alcohol. According to the study, marijuana only adversely impacted subjects' ability to maintain a constant speed and control while driving around a figure-eight loop. Reaction time and all other measures of driving performance remained unaffected. Researchers also noted that the subjects who had smoked marijuana - unlike alcohol users - were aware of their impairment and attempted to compensate for it by driving more cautiously.
Similar results were also reported in March by a South Australian team at the Department of Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology at the University of Adelaide. Their epidemiological review of automobile accidents found that alcohol "overwhelmingly plays the greatest role in road crashes ... [and] conversely, ... marijuana has a negligible impact on culpability." The study was a follow up to a 1998 analysis of 2,500 injured drivers that previously determined cannabis to have "no significant effect" on drivers' culpability in motor vehicle accidents.
In fact, most marijuana and driving experiments give pot a relatively clean bill of health, particularly when compared to alcohol. A review of two-decades worth of driving simulator and on-road studies by Alison Smiley for Toronto's Centre for Addiction and Mental Health concluded that although marijuana temporarily impairs driving behavior, "this impairment is mitigated in that subjects under marijuana treatment appear to perceive that they are indeed impaired [and] where they can compensate, they do."
http://www.norml.org/index.cfm?Group_ID=5449
One of several articles about driving high on pot.
"Moreover, emerging scientific research indicates that cannabis actually has far less impact on the psychomotor skills needed for driving than alcohol does, and is seldom a causal factor in automobile accidents. A pair of international studies released in the spring of 2001 bolsters this argument. "
Ummm...my recollection of this from high school is somewhat different. It would be hard to describe my driving friends as anything less than impaired.