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Should Cannabis Be Regulated Like Alcohol?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2023
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I would argue cannabis, especially of the average potency and in moderation, doesn't impair most EVERYDAY users any more than a cigarette might (those things spike your blood pressure and dehydrate you fast!!) but I just especially have to object to treating high driving exactly the same. As another user stated, the statistics are very clear. To quote a friend's dad "If you can't drive and smoke weed, you can't drive."
If we engineered our roadways around the idea that people would be operating with a reduced reaction speed than normal, this would be fine. But we didn't, everything is designed to be safe for normal operation.
Most isn't good enough. If it impairs 10% of people, and increases fatalities even a little bit, it should be a DUI, unless there is some kind of medical exemption or something.
It impairs maybe 10% of people. They should know better than to drive and the other 90% shouldn't be held responsible for their mistake. But reduced reaction speed? Nah, THC is magical in that it's a mental stimulant that almost slows down one's perception of time, you clearly haven't heard of hackey-sack or met anybody that plays FPS games at a serious level.
I don't think it's reasonable to say that because only 10% of drivers are reckless, we don't get to regulate the other 90% along with them. Of course if we had some magical wand that would tell us who the reckless drivers are, then we could only target the dangerous folks, but often that's impossible.
Often the best we can do is take a look at the data and see what kind of policies would not be horribly burdensome for the general public and yet would save a lot of lives, and then we institute those.
The other part of the problem with the 10% bad drivers argument is that bad drivers change from hour to hour, and from day to day. After all, the majority of people believe that they're good drivers, right?