slimvictor
Bluelight Crew
In STONED, palliative care physician Dr. David Casarett sets out to do anything—including experimenting on himself—to find evidence of marijuana’s medical potential. He smears mysterious marijuana paste on his legs and samples pot wine. He poses as a patient at a seedy California clinic and takes lessons from an artisanal hash maker. In conversations with researchers, doctors, and patients around the world he learns how marijuana works—and doesn’t—in the real world.
I’m curious about marijuana’s effects on someone’s ability to drive. And I’m curious about its effect on insight. Does a stoned person know that he’s too stoned to drive? I’m about to find out.
I’m standing in a deserted parking lot next to an aged Honda Civic with my patient Jeff, a medical marijuana user (and driver), who has just smoked the contents of a decent-sized joint. I envisioned performing a formal driving test with traffic cones, but alas, I didn’t plan ahead. So instead I stopped at a grocery store and picked up ten pounds of bananas. In the past few minutes, as Jeff was turning his joint to ashes, I arranged twenty-four bananas spaced 10 feet apart in two parallel lines forming a lane about twelve feet wide.
Now as we sit in Jeff ’s car I explain my plan. First, he’ll drive between the two lines of bananas. Then he’ll back up the same way. Then, as fast as he can, he’s going to weave through the bananas on the right side, execute a U-turn, and then weave through the other line.
It’s a simple plan, and Jeff is nodding. But he’s he has the glassy-eyed expression of a dead fish, and it seems like he’s paying a little too much attention to a flock of seagulls clustered at the far end of the parking lot. I tighten my seat belt.
But Jeff isn’t ready to drive. He’s not even sure where to put his feet. So we sit in companionable silence while Jeff is entertained by the parking lot’s resident seagulls.
How long are we going to have to wait until Jeff ’s brain rejoins us? Based on what I’ve read in the executive report on marijuana and driving that was published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it might be some time. That document is about as dull as it sounds, perhaps because the clean-living folks at the NHTSA are not terribly enthusiastic about drivers getting stoned. For instance, they warn that marijuana impairs driving ability immediately, and that its effects can last for up to three hours.
Twenty minutes after Jeff finished his joint—and well within the NHTSA danger zone—Jeff says he feels a little better. He looks about the same, though. And he’s still staring straight ahead, smiling, and laughing occasionally. So I’m eager to see what “better” looks like once our wheels start turning.
(...)
There’s another test that works better, although it’s not going to assuage the concerns of many state troopers. In an fMRI study of stoned drivers, fMRI changes weren’t associated with blood levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient. But those changes were strongly associated with feelings of confusion. That is, the subjective feeling of confusion was a good predictor of brain changes.
So a good test of driving ability might be as simple as an honest self-assessment. Maybe the best predictor of whether your drive to the grocery store is going to end in a collision with a tree is how stoned you feel.
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/25/dude_wheres_my_car_how_stoned_is_too_stoned_to_drive/
I’m curious about marijuana’s effects on someone’s ability to drive. And I’m curious about its effect on insight. Does a stoned person know that he’s too stoned to drive? I’m about to find out.
I’m standing in a deserted parking lot next to an aged Honda Civic with my patient Jeff, a medical marijuana user (and driver), who has just smoked the contents of a decent-sized joint. I envisioned performing a formal driving test with traffic cones, but alas, I didn’t plan ahead. So instead I stopped at a grocery store and picked up ten pounds of bananas. In the past few minutes, as Jeff was turning his joint to ashes, I arranged twenty-four bananas spaced 10 feet apart in two parallel lines forming a lane about twelve feet wide.
Now as we sit in Jeff ’s car I explain my plan. First, he’ll drive between the two lines of bananas. Then he’ll back up the same way. Then, as fast as he can, he’s going to weave through the bananas on the right side, execute a U-turn, and then weave through the other line.
It’s a simple plan, and Jeff is nodding. But he’s he has the glassy-eyed expression of a dead fish, and it seems like he’s paying a little too much attention to a flock of seagulls clustered at the far end of the parking lot. I tighten my seat belt.
But Jeff isn’t ready to drive. He’s not even sure where to put his feet. So we sit in companionable silence while Jeff is entertained by the parking lot’s resident seagulls.
How long are we going to have to wait until Jeff ’s brain rejoins us? Based on what I’ve read in the executive report on marijuana and driving that was published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it might be some time. That document is about as dull as it sounds, perhaps because the clean-living folks at the NHTSA are not terribly enthusiastic about drivers getting stoned. For instance, they warn that marijuana impairs driving ability immediately, and that its effects can last for up to three hours.
Twenty minutes after Jeff finished his joint—and well within the NHTSA danger zone—Jeff says he feels a little better. He looks about the same, though. And he’s still staring straight ahead, smiling, and laughing occasionally. So I’m eager to see what “better” looks like once our wheels start turning.
(...)
There’s another test that works better, although it’s not going to assuage the concerns of many state troopers. In an fMRI study of stoned drivers, fMRI changes weren’t associated with blood levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient. But those changes were strongly associated with feelings of confusion. That is, the subjective feeling of confusion was a good predictor of brain changes.
So a good test of driving ability might be as simple as an honest self-assessment. Maybe the best predictor of whether your drive to the grocery store is going to end in a collision with a tree is how stoned you feel.
cont at
http://www.salon.com/2015/07/25/dude_wheres_my_car_how_stoned_is_too_stoned_to_drive/
