> or you just met god and are traveling back in time to the moment you were just at, which is not an ideal moment to be in a car ( you might be going 20 miles an hour slowly over someone ).

No doubt. But how does that work in practice? Is someone seeing god likely to be getting behind the wheel, or are they just lying wasted on the couch somewhere? Can it also happen with a delay?

What I've noticed with alcohol (which is legal!) is that sometimes I'd drink, and everything would seem fine, then it would hit me like a ton of bricks 15 minutes later. 15 minutes is enough to figure "yeah, I'm fine, let me get in my car" and end up in traffic.

My point is that I'm wondering whether weed (which I don't smoke) is actually worse than alcohol (which I do sometimes drink). And since we already have plenty of people smoking weed, maybe legalizing it would help with education.

When I took my driver's license in France, there's a whole segment on driving intoxicated. They'd go into the effects of cannabis, which clearly don't seem great for driving, but that'd be about it, besides the generic "drugs are bad, mkay". Whereas alcohol, while also decried, had a bit more info, such as a rule-of-thumb of how long it takes to get out of the blood stream, interactions with food, etc. So, I know that I shouldn't drive while high, but since I've already smoked a joint right now, how long can I expect to wait before I'm legal again? Crickets.

I genuinely agree. Amusingly, this is the side effect of war on drugs. As in, those various interactions for the longest time were not common knowledge, but word of mouth mostly. On the other hand, we have centuries of alcohol use and abuse history to draw from and learn.

That said, I can't blame it all on lack of knowledge. There is a fair amount of regular prescription medication that clearly says "don't do anything after you take it", which is also mentioned in passing by your doctor and yet people either don't listen or just assume it won't affect them?

FWIW, I genuinely don't know what the answer is here.

> Is someone seeing god likely to be getting behind the wheel

I think you're significantly discounting the number of people who smoke weed while driving. I saw quite a bit of it in college- much more, in fact, than drinking alcohol before driving (never saw some literally drinking while driving, though I know it happens).

Apologies for the completely made up numbers, but I think it is illustrative: If weed only makes you 5% more likely to get into an accident (compared to, say, 50-75% for alcohol), but legalization causes an additional 10-15% of the population to drive stoned, that's still a statistically significant effect.

Real numbers would be useful to draw meaningful conclusions about what to do about it, but I think it's not unreasonable to believe that it will have a negative effect in this regard.

> If weed only makes you 5% more likely to get into an accident (compared to, say, 50-75% for alcohol), but legalization causes an additional 10-15% of the population to drive stoned, that's still a statistically significant effect.

Sure, but isn't that also an argument for outlawing alcohol?

I don't think I meant "negative effect" in my last paragraph to mean "should remain outlawed", but rather that we need to understand and perhaps plan for the negative consequences of legalization.

The biggest challenge is that there is not yet any procedure that can verify impairment by marijuana. With alcohol, it is easy- any amount over 0.08 and you are legally considered impacted.

With pot, the metabolites stay in your system for weeks. Did you crash because of a genuine accident, or did you crash because you were driving impaired by weed? The police don't have a way to make a distinction with a simple breath / blood test, so it is harder to enforce.