Colorado House Judiciary passes per se DUID bill

(Colorado Independent) Medical Marijuana patients and recreational users of the drug filled the Old Supreme Court chambers of the Capitol Thursday as they emotionally testified against a bill to make driving while high a DUI per se. Targeting what they said were faulty or old studies, medical marijuana users failed to convince the House Judiciary Committee that marijuana did not pose a risk to themselves and others while they drove. The vote passed 6-3 with many members absent.

As introduced, HB 1261 makes driving with a blood content of 5 nanograms of THC or more a misdemeanor and creates the presumption that the person is driving under the influence of drugs as a result. The offense would essentially be treated the same as a DUI for alcohol.

Many of those testifying against the bill called into question the 5 nanogram per se limit and called for an 8 nanogram limit if there was to be a limit at all. They said that many long-term medical marijuana users have developed a tolerance that allows them to perform better than occasional users.

We’ve gotten much correspondence here at NORML about this subject.  The fact is that reliable studies to show that 5ng/ml of THC detected in the blood is fairly indicative of marijuana use within 1-3 hours.  This isn’t metabolites in a pee test we’re talking about – those can be detected for days or weeks after use.  For the vast majority of marijuana users, smoking pot will spike your blood-THC over 5ng/ml and that level will usually drop below that threshold within a few hours.

That said, the question here is impairment, not whether someone has recently used cannabis.  Again, reliable studies show that 5ng/ml blood-THC will put most tokers into a state of psychomotor impairment compared to non-toking controls.  No matter what you think or what you’ve heard, if you smoke pot and drive, you are not a better driver and not even as good a driver as you are when your are sober.  However, are you too impaired to drive?

A bottle of Marinol – synthetic THC – comes with a warning that says “Until you know how dronabinol (Marinol) may affect you, don’t drive or operate heavy machinery.”  We all have seen the occasional elderly driver – perfectly sober – whose abilities and reactions have degraded to a level worse than a cannabis-impaired driver.  And these same reliable studies show that even a 5ng/ml blood-THC driver exhibits impairment less than or equal to drivers with a 0.05 blood-alcohol content, a level at which we do not automatically consider the drinking driver to be impaired unless there is other compelling evidence.

Then again, would you encourage the person with a 0.05 blood-alcohol content to grab the keys and drive down the freeway?  Of course not.  Even if that 0.05 BAC driver is an alcoholic with a tolerance and can drive better than the sober octogenarian, our society doesn’t operate on an absolute scale of driving ability, but a relative scale.  Meaning, if we were grading drivers, and you’re an A+ driver and the octogenarian is a C-, you’re a bad person for drinking and dropping your A+ down to a C+, or even toking and dropping your A+ down to an A-, even though you’re still a better driver than the C- sober 80-year-old.  In society’s eyes, you’re purposefully making yourself a bigger risk than you need to be, even though we tolerate the greater risk of the 80-year-old.  It’s a stupid paradigm and why I personally hate per se DUID laws and would prefer that even blood-alcohol laws be replaced with objective roadside impairment testing.  I don’t care what’s in your system, I just want to be safe on the road when you’re driving.

NORML’s policy has always been “No Driving”.  Could you smoke a joint and then be a relatively safe driver?  Perhaps – certainly many tokers have driven and we don’t see much evidence that toking drivers are leading to increased accident or death statistics.  But why expose yourself and other drivers to unnecessary risk, even if it is a minor risk?  Not just the possibility of an accident, but also getting caught driving while high – traffic stops are where you are most likely to deal with a cop.

A number of experts testified to the effect that while a person may think they are not affected their body is not performing up to speed. They said one test that is done, for example, is to see if someone can cross their eyes–an action that those too heavily under the influence cannot perform.

Yeah, let’s keep that as the standard.  I have never been so high that I can’t cross my eyes.  Who came up with that one?

“I am going to lecture this committee, because this is the judiciary committee which mean pertaining to justice and there is injustice here,” Miguel Lopez said. “This is a constitutional medicine and there is no other medicine that has been targeted like this community has, and I am speaking as an openly gay Chicano.”

Um… OK.  We’ll be playing audio of Mr. Lopez’s and other fascinating testimony on today’s NORML SHOW LIVE.  I’m dying to know how sexual orientation and Hispanic ethnicity bestows expertise on psycho-pharmacology and traffic safety statistics.