Some people like cannabis the same way some people like drinking coffee.
Drinking coffee for the first time and then going for a drive may impair you.
But, for the tolerant user, caffeinated drives are a must.
As an occasional cannabis consumer or first time user, it is not recommend you drive. You’ll likely drive too slow, mimicking the skills of an old lady looking up at her own steering wheel.
Driving a car is an extension of the self. Your mirrors become your eyes, your feet and arms give you speed and direction.
Fully automated cars may replace taxis, but they will never replace the joy of driving yourself.
When consuming cannabis is like drinking coffee, not consuming cannabis before a drive is an impairment.
Being impaired implies a handicap, as if you were weakened or damaged. Cannabis only does this if you’re unfamiliar with the high or incapable of handling it.
Like any medicine, know your dose, know your limits.
When MADD Canada chief executive officer Andrew Murie says, “As laws change in Canada we think it’s important to take the same approach to cannabis as we have with alcohol,” he is speaking out of his ass.
Tweed and Bedrocan are funding a MADD propaganda campaign to “promote evidence based drug policy” which means making conjectures about cannabis based on no facts whatsoever.
The 2002 Canadian Senate Report is clear: “Cannabis alone, particularly in low doses, [many connoisseurs microdose throughout the day] has little effect on the skills involved in automobile driving. Cannabis leads to a more cautious style of driving.”
The worst cannabis does? “[A] negative impact on decision time and trajectory,” but, “This in itself does not mean that drivers under the influence of cannabis represent a traffic safety risk”
And the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concluded that if you factor out age, gender, race and alcohol, “drivers who tested positive for marijuana were no more likely to crash” than non-medicated drivers.
Cannabis may actually reduce accidents. In legalized states, there has been an eight to 11 per cent decrease in traffic fatalities. One reason for this, researchers say, is because people are substituting cannabis for booze and prescription pills and so there are fewer impaired drivers on the road.
Cannabis is helping, not hindering.
The cannabis road scare, propagated by Canopy LPs like Tweed and Bedrocan, is propaganda at its finest.
They are doing “our part as responsible corporate citizens,” Bruce Linton reminds us.
If cannabis is as dangerous as alcohol, where are the traffic fatalities? People have been smoking and driving in spite of its illegality.
Are we to assume the data to justify all this will come after legalization? Because it’s assumed more people will be smoking once it’s legal? And that’s where the data will come from? A future hypothetical?
Absent any evidence, certainly not the kind we have for alcohol, MADD and the LPs are resorting to outlandish, unsubstantiated claims about cannabis.