I agree that the impairment increase from even a small amount of alcohol added to cannabis is significant. I've been known to add a beer or two to a cannabis buzz, but only on occasions when I'm not driving. I'm hesitant to even get on a bicycle if I'm doing that.
But I've had extensive experience and observation of the effects of driving…
I agree that the impairment increase from even a small amount of alcohol added to cannabis is significant. I've been known to add a beer or two to a cannabis buzz, but only on occasions when I'm not driving. I'm hesitant to even get on a bicycle if I'm doing that.
But I've had extensive experience and observation of the effects of driving after using cannabis alone, and my conclusions are roughly in lines with those of Andrew Weil, MD over 50 years ago: in the commonly used dosages, cannabis is a catalyst to a mild mind-altering shift that isn't nearly as profound or debilitating as alcohol intoxication, and once people become familiar with the effects, as a rule they're able to perform activities like driving capably. Safely enough that I've never worried about getting in the car with a driver who had been smoking pot...hey, I was a cab driver.
Andrew Weil got it right about weed 50 years ago, in The Natural Mind. There's a reason why sports like snowboarding, halfpipe skateboarding, and surfing have such a long association with weed smokers, even at the elite level. Athletes trained in their skill can do all sorts of fancy gravity defying precision tricks while high out their mind on kine bud. That isn't possible with alcohol. Nobody ever learned how to carve those tracks while drunk. The extreme athletes save the beer for the ski lodge, the backyard, and the beach. At the physical coordination, balance, and athletic performance level, it's no contest: marijuana doesn't impair experienced users, but alcohol follows a very steep increase of impairment with increasing quantity.
This finding has repeatedly shown up in driving simulator tests, incidentally. The researchers keep trying ways to make weed wrong in those studies; these days, studies resort to tactics like force-toking the subjects (including cannabis newbies) for fifteen minutes and shoving them in the simulator ten minutes later- or torturing the data by moving the goalposts of the parameters said to detect impairment- in order to do it. And even then, the experienced stoners refuse to play along.
I'm of the mind that the epidemiological evidence is where the rubber meets the road on this question- there's plenty of data available, and even laypeople with basic math skills (ratios, percentages) can make reasoned and accurate inferences from the numbers without third-order extrapolated meta-analysis, chi-square distributions, or regression plots. Long story short: the smartphone began to add a whole other level of complication to safe driving about 10 years ago, and hopefully the problem will level off and decline. But we've had millions of stoned drivers on the road for around 55 years, and their performance doesn't track differently from the average. There's even some statistical indication that they do better. Even as far as clinical studies, after 40+ years of driving simulator tests, the meta-takeaway is still "the evidence for impairment is inconsistent." A neat choice of words. And not one that's applied to similar studies of alcohol impairment.
( That said, I'm opposed to using per se alcohol levels as sole proof of DUI. I think police cameras and performance tests are more accurate. I heard enough credibly narrated horror stories about overzealous DUI enforcement as a cabdriver in California that I've gotten very skeptical of chemical forensics to determine impairment. Scores of DUI convictions have been overturned and cases dismissed on account of investigations into bad lab work, in some local regions of the US. Peter Lance really booked a case on DUI enforcement abuses in his writings on the topic. http://peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=1214 )
Some skilled skateboarders can handle a bit of alcohol, I suppose. But you'd have to be a hell of a young, eagle-eyed mesomorph- and a practiced drinker- to skate half pipe after drinking a 40 oz. beer. I can't imagine anyone making a regular practice of that.
Mentally, I think a cannabis buzz is about equivalent to a one or two beer high, at most. But I've realized- also through experience- that I don't want a one-beer high when I'm learning a new scholastic skill, or a mental activity like learning a new language or a musical instrument. I want a two-coffee high, at least until I'm able to get a confident grasp of the activity. I want to learn stuff, not be high all the time.
I, too, occasionally drove drunk or drunk and stoned as a teenager in the 1970s. (I'm early 1970s. The HS class of 1973 is on the whole very different from the HS class of 1979, culturally.) It really was a different world...I knew at least one guy who had racked up three DWIs by his senior year in high school. And that's how long it took him to get his first license suspension. His first offense, was, I shit you not, a $50 fine. I think he also got 3 points on his driving record- and, if memory serves, 9 points meant a suspension. He got three DWIs in three years, the last one he wrapped his GTO around a telephone pole. So that was the 70s.
That guy was one of several of my high school classmates to get popped for alcohol DWI. But I never once heard of a single one of my classmates getting into an accident of any kind while driving stoned on pot, much less being pulled over for DWI. That empirical observation also influenced my opinion that marijuana didn't impair good driving the way alcohol does.
Not that I occasionally drove while high on pot, of course. I did it all the time. As did many of my classmates. I've since concluded that getting high on weed all the time at that age was a wrong, bad decision- at minimum, a terrible waste of time, opportunity, and my own resources. But impaired ability to drive safely was never part of the problem.
As for my experiences driving drunk on alcohol: for the grace of G~d, here I am, unscathed and unmarked by guilt. I never got in an accident, and not once was I pulled over by police, not even the time (or two?) when I was so loaded that I had to hold one hand over my eye to stay in my lane. I will give credit to what remained of my good judgement at the time that I had slowed the speed of the car to 15 miles an hour in order to compensate for the delays in my reaction time.
Yes, I was a bust. Even if it was only $50 and 3 points on my record, my parents- whose car it was- would have been scandalized. The weight of a full-scale shonda, only gentile style (more cross-cultural similarity there than is implied by the Yiddishism.) All it would have taken is crossing paths with one patrol car. But I was spared.
As for mixing cannabis with alcohol: if I'm not driving, I can pace a drink every hour while eating and have fun while being happily spaced out on pot. I might do that a couple times a year. Social occasions in the summertime.
But in the days when I drank to get drunk- a practice that predated my pot smoking, and one that I've long since given up- a few tokes of weed, and spin city. The vomitorium, baby. No bueno.
That untoward reaction to adding weed on top of a drunk would probably require only one toke of today's overhyped unsubtle superweed that I don't care for, incidentally. But since I have little use for pseudo-elite ultrahigh THC indoor grown factory weed, and even less use for getting hammered on booze, I don't plan to find out.
I agree that the impairment increase from even a small amount of alcohol added to cannabis is significant. I've been known to add a beer or two to a cannabis buzz, but only on occasions when I'm not driving. I'm hesitant to even get on a bicycle if I'm doing that.
But I've had extensive experience and observation of the effects of driving after using cannabis alone, and my conclusions are roughly in lines with those of Andrew Weil, MD over 50 years ago: in the commonly used dosages, cannabis is a catalyst to a mild mind-altering shift that isn't nearly as profound or debilitating as alcohol intoxication, and once people become familiar with the effects, as a rule they're able to perform activities like driving capably. Safely enough that I've never worried about getting in the car with a driver who had been smoking pot...hey, I was a cab driver.
Andrew Weil got it right about weed 50 years ago, in The Natural Mind. There's a reason why sports like snowboarding, halfpipe skateboarding, and surfing have such a long association with weed smokers, even at the elite level. Athletes trained in their skill can do all sorts of fancy gravity defying precision tricks while high out their mind on kine bud. That isn't possible with alcohol. Nobody ever learned how to carve those tracks while drunk. The extreme athletes save the beer for the ski lodge, the backyard, and the beach. At the physical coordination, balance, and athletic performance level, it's no contest: marijuana doesn't impair experienced users, but alcohol follows a very steep increase of impairment with increasing quantity.
This finding has repeatedly shown up in driving simulator tests, incidentally. The researchers keep trying ways to make weed wrong in those studies; these days, studies resort to tactics like force-toking the subjects (including cannabis newbies) for fifteen minutes and shoving them in the simulator ten minutes later- or torturing the data by moving the goalposts of the parameters said to detect impairment- in order to do it. And even then, the experienced stoners refuse to play along.
I'm of the mind that the epidemiological evidence is where the rubber meets the road on this question- there's plenty of data available, and even laypeople with basic math skills (ratios, percentages) can make reasoned and accurate inferences from the numbers without third-order extrapolated meta-analysis, chi-square distributions, or regression plots. Long story short: the smartphone began to add a whole other level of complication to safe driving about 10 years ago, and hopefully the problem will level off and decline. But we've had millions of stoned drivers on the road for around 55 years, and their performance doesn't track differently from the average. There's even some statistical indication that they do better. Even as far as clinical studies, after 40+ years of driving simulator tests, the meta-takeaway is still "the evidence for impairment is inconsistent." A neat choice of words. And not one that's applied to similar studies of alcohol impairment.
( That said, I'm opposed to using per se alcohol levels as sole proof of DUI. I think police cameras and performance tests are more accurate. I heard enough credibly narrated horror stories about overzealous DUI enforcement as a cabdriver in California that I've gotten very skeptical of chemical forensics to determine impairment. Scores of DUI convictions have been overturned and cases dismissed on account of investigations into bad lab work, in some local regions of the US. Peter Lance really booked a case on DUI enforcement abuses in his writings on the topic. http://peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=1214 )
Some skilled skateboarders can handle a bit of alcohol, I suppose. But you'd have to be a hell of a young, eagle-eyed mesomorph- and a practiced drinker- to skate half pipe after drinking a 40 oz. beer. I can't imagine anyone making a regular practice of that.
Mentally, I think a cannabis buzz is about equivalent to a one or two beer high, at most. But I've realized- also through experience- that I don't want a one-beer high when I'm learning a new scholastic skill, or a mental activity like learning a new language or a musical instrument. I want a two-coffee high, at least until I'm able to get a confident grasp of the activity. I want to learn stuff, not be high all the time.
I, too, occasionally drove drunk or drunk and stoned as a teenager in the 1970s. (I'm early 1970s. The HS class of 1973 is on the whole very different from the HS class of 1979, culturally.) It really was a different world...I knew at least one guy who had racked up three DWIs by his senior year in high school. And that's how long it took him to get his first license suspension. His first offense, was, I shit you not, a $50 fine. I think he also got 3 points on his driving record- and, if memory serves, 9 points meant a suspension. He got three DWIs in three years, the last one he wrapped his GTO around a telephone pole. So that was the 70s.
That guy was one of several of my high school classmates to get popped for alcohol DWI. But I never once heard of a single one of my classmates getting into an accident of any kind while driving stoned on pot, much less being pulled over for DWI. That empirical observation also influenced my opinion that marijuana didn't impair good driving the way alcohol does.
Not that I occasionally drove while high on pot, of course. I did it all the time. As did many of my classmates. I've since concluded that getting high on weed all the time at that age was a wrong, bad decision- at minimum, a terrible waste of time, opportunity, and my own resources. But impaired ability to drive safely was never part of the problem.
As for my experiences driving drunk on alcohol: for the grace of G~d, here I am, unscathed and unmarked by guilt. I never got in an accident, and not once was I pulled over by police, not even the time (or two?) when I was so loaded that I had to hold one hand over my eye to stay in my lane. I will give credit to what remained of my good judgement at the time that I had slowed the speed of the car to 15 miles an hour in order to compensate for the delays in my reaction time.
Yes, I was a bust. Even if it was only $50 and 3 points on my record, my parents- whose car it was- would have been scandalized. The weight of a full-scale shonda, only gentile style (more cross-cultural similarity there than is implied by the Yiddishism.) All it would have taken is crossing paths with one patrol car. But I was spared.
As for mixing cannabis with alcohol: if I'm not driving, I can pace a drink every hour while eating and have fun while being happily spaced out on pot. I might do that a couple times a year. Social occasions in the summertime.
But in the days when I drank to get drunk- a practice that predated my pot smoking, and one that I've long since given up- a few tokes of weed, and spin city. The vomitorium, baby. No bueno.
That untoward reaction to adding weed on top of a drunk would probably require only one toke of today's overhyped unsubtle superweed that I don't care for, incidentally. But since I have little use for pseudo-elite ultrahigh THC indoor grown factory weed, and even less use for getting hammered on booze, I don't plan to find out.
Our world does not revolve around "dudes." There's nothing good to be said about "drugs." Cheers!