Is Driving High as Dangerous as Driving Drunk?

Q: I know all about the dangers of driving while drunk. But is driving while high on marijuana as dangerous?

Any form of driving while intoxicated is obviously a bad idea, but smoking a joint or taking an edible before getting behind the wheel can pose distinctive risks. That, experts say, is because of the particular ways that marijuana affects the brain, and the fact that there’s no standard dose for a federally criminalized drug.

With alcohol, there are universally accepted quantities for what constitutes a single drink: 12 ounces of regular beer, five ounces of wine and 1.5 ounces of distilled spirits. There’s no agreed-upon equivalent for cannabis, said Marlene Lira, a senior research manager at the Clinical Addiction Research and Education Unit at Boston Medical Center. This makes it tricky for consumers to measure how much they’ve actually consumed, and to assess how much cannabis is too much before heading on the road.

During the past decade, car accidents involving cannabis have been rising, and recreational use of the drug continues to climb. A recent analysis of U.S. public safety data showed that from 2000 to 2018, the percentage of motor vehicle fatalities involving cannabis more than doubled from nine percent to about 22 percent. By contrast, the percentage of fatalities involving alcohol stayed roughly the same during this period. [Read More @ The NY Times]