Meds Cannabis and Driving

[felvapes]

In NSW and Vic and Qld they swipe mouth test all the time
It just shows that it is in your system, not when you consumed
People can fail them up to a week later and there is one court case where the judge let the defendant off. He had failed a test and then asked the police how long he had to wait after consuming to drive.
They said 24 hours, he got caught again a week after consuming and the judge ruled in his favour

The tests are not accurate anyway and give false results
I know non users who have failed and wake and bakers who have passed
I also bought 3 of the same tests to try - I vaped and dabbed before all of them and I couldn't fail lol

I now have medical approval and love that the police can't do anything about possession
I am still as I always have been worried about getting pulled over and having to do a test
At least if I do and fail I can walk away with my weed in my pocket now

The new laws in tazzy give me hope other states may catch up as this is how it should be
About impairment not having it in your system
Some people will be unable to move from a small puff
Other users will be able to dab a few points and go for a drive or do an exam without a problem
All depends on the person and consumption rates
Some medical patients consume a lot to function, others use smaller doses

I like the druid type system described above - tests skills and reaction times vs traces in the system

I drive stoned all the time
I've only ever had accidents sober
I obviously wouldn't drive if I was laser eyes smashed about to pass out, but I consume a lot and I am not affected like many in the same way on smaller doses

 

[LesPlenty]

if I was laser eyes smashed about to pass out,

That is about where I like to be most days, nice and numb.

 

[momofthegoons]

Study identifies potential test for cannabis impairment​

Researchers see tool for safer roads, workplaces​

BY MGH News and Public Affairs
DATEJanuary 11, 2022


Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have found a noninvasive brain imaging procedure to be an objective and reliable way to identify individuals whose performance has been impaired by THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

The technique uses imaging technology known as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain activation patterns that correlate to impairment from THC intoxication. As reported in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the procedure could have significant implications for improving highway and workplace safety.

The increased use of cannabis through legalization has created the urgent need for a portable brain imaging procedure that can distinguish between impairment and mild intoxication from THC.

“Our research represents a novel direction for impairment testing in the field,” says lead author Jodi Gilman, investigator in the Center for Addiction Medicine, MGH, and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Our goal was to determine if cannabis impairment could be detected from activity of the brain on an individual level. This is a critical issue because a ‘breathalyzer’ type of approach will not work for detecting cannabis impairment, which makes it very difficult to objectively assess impairment from THC during a traffic stop.”

THC has been shown in past studies to impair cognitive and psychomotor performance essential to safe driving, a factor thought to at least double the risk of fatal motor vehicle accidents. The challenge for scientists, however, is that the concentration of THC in the body does not correspond well to functional impairment. One reason is that people who use cannabis often can have high levels of THC in the body and not be impaired. Another is that metabolites of THC can remain in the bloodstream for weeks after the last cannabis use, well beyond the period of intoxication. Hence the need for a different method to determine impairment from cannabis intoxication.

“We need a method that won’t penalize medical marijuana users or others with insufficient amounts of cannabis in their system to impair their performance.”
— Jodi Gilman, lead author

In the MGH study, 169 cannabis users underwent fNIRS brain imaging before and after receiving either oral THC or a placebo. Participants who reported intoxication after being given oral THC showed an increased oxygenated hemoglobin concentration (HbO) — a type of neural activity signature from the prefrontal cortex region of the brain — compared to those who reported low or no intoxication.

“Identification of acute impairment from THC intoxication through portable brain imaging could be a vital tool in the hands of police officers in the field,” explains senior author and principal investigator A. Eden Evins, founding director of the Center for Addiction Medicine. “The accuracy of this method was confirmed by the fact impairment determined by machine learning models using only information from fNIRS matched self-report and clinical assessment of impairment 76 percent of the time.”

While the study did not specifically assess fNIRS in roadside assessments of impaired driving, it did cite considerable advantages for such an application. These include the feasibility of inexpensive, lightweight, battery-powered fNIRS devices that allow data to either be stored on wearable recording units or transmitted wirelessly to a laptop. Moreover, fNIRS technology could be incorporated into a headband or cap, and thus require minimal set-up time.

“Companies are developing breathalyzer devices that only measure exposure to cannabis but not impairment from cannabis,” says Gilman. “We need a method that won’t penalize medical marijuana users or others with insufficient amounts of cannabis in their system to impair their performance. While it requires further study, we believe brain-based testing could provide an objective, practical and much needed solution.”

Evins is the Cox Family Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

 

[Tincandtoke]

Study identifies potential test for cannabis impairment​

Researchers see tool for safer roads, workplaces​

BY MGH News and Public Affairs
DATEJanuary 11, 2022


Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have found a noninvasive brain imaging procedure to be an objective and reliable way to identify individuals whose performance has been impaired by THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis.

The technique uses imaging technology known as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure brain activation patterns that correlate to impairment from THC intoxication. As reported in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the procedure could have significant implications for improving highway and workplace safety.

The increased use of cannabis through legalization has created the urgent need for a portable brain imaging procedure that can distinguish between impairment and mild intoxication from THC.

“Our research represents a novel direction for impairment testing in the field,” says lead author Jodi Gilman, investigator in the Center for Addiction Medicine, MGH, and associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. “Our goal was to determine if cannabis impairment could be detected from activity of the brain on an individual level. This is a critical issue because a ‘breathalyzer’ type of approach will not work for detecting cannabis impairment, which makes it very difficult to objectively assess impairment from THC during a traffic stop.”

THC has been shown in past studies to impair cognitive and psychomotor performance essential to safe driving, a factor thought to at least double the risk of fatal motor vehicle accidents. The challenge for scientists, however, is that the concentration of THC in the body does not correspond well to functional impairment. One reason is that people who use cannabis often can have high levels of THC in the body and not be impaired. Another is that metabolites of THC can remain in the bloodstream for weeks after the last cannabis use, well beyond the period of intoxication. Hence the need for a different method to determine impairment from cannabis intoxication.

“We need a method that won’t penalize medical marijuana users or others with insufficient amounts of cannabis in their system to impair their performance.”
— Jodi Gilman, lead author

In the MGH study, 169 cannabis users underwent fNIRS brain imaging before and after receiving either oral THC or a placebo. Participants who reported intoxication after being given oral THC showed an increased oxygenated hemoglobin concentration (HbO) — a type of neural activity signature from the prefrontal cortex region of the brain — compared to those who reported low or no intoxication.

“Identification of acute impairment from THC intoxication through portable brain imaging could be a vital tool in the hands of police officers in the field,” explains senior author and principal investigator A. Eden Evins, founding director of the Center for Addiction Medicine. “The accuracy of this method was confirmed by the fact impairment determined by machine learning models using only information from fNIRS matched self-report and clinical assessment of impairment 76 percent of the time.”

While the study did not specifically assess fNIRS in roadside assessments of impaired driving, it did cite considerable advantages for such an application. These include the feasibility of inexpensive, lightweight, battery-powered fNIRS devices that allow data to either be stored on wearable recording units or transmitted wirelessly to a laptop. Moreover, fNIRS technology could be incorporated into a headband or cap, and thus require minimal set-up time.

“Companies are developing breathalyzer devices that only measure exposure to cannabis but not impairment from cannabis,” says Gilman. “We need a method that won’t penalize medical marijuana users or others with insufficient amounts of cannabis in their system to impair their performance. While it requires further study, we believe brain-based testing could provide an objective, practical and much needed solution.”

Evins is the Cox Family Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

It will be ready and field tested by the time we have flying cars
They are going to deploy this and who is going to operate it?
Are they going to patrol with imaging specialists?
I see a flood of lawsuits
Look we have a magic cap
Didn't they try to pass this off as hair growing technology some years ago

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[momofthegoons]

Canadian Study Links Cannabis Legalization to an Increase in Car Accidents​

Americans tend to live under an onslaught of information derived from “studies,” “reports,” and the like, especially cannabis users. However, the best response when confronted with some hair-raising headline about the result of a new study is typically to ask for more context.

The results of a recent study published in JAMA Network Open claim to have found an association between cannabis legalization and an increase in traffic accidents.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Ottawa and looked at emergency room visits in Ontario, Canada over a 13-year period (Jan 2010-Dec 2021 which is actually 12 years but they say 13 in the study so what do I know), at the end of which they denoted a 475.3% increase in traffic accidents that resulted in an emergency room visit in which the driver had cannabis in their system at the time of the accident.

“This cross-sectional study found large increases in cannabis involvement in ED visits for traffic injury over time, which may have accelerated following nonmedical cannabis commercialization,” the conclusion of the study said. “Although the frequency of visits was rare, they may reflect broader changes in cannabis-impaired driving. Greater prevention efforts, including targeted education and policy measures, in regions with legal cannabis are indicated.”

At first glance, 475.3% sounds like a big number and suffice it to say many of the anti-cannabis media outlets who repackaged that number for a scary-sounding headline are counting on their readership to look no further and take their word for it that cannabis legalization and car crashes must be associated. I’m a journalist, not a scientist, but I am able to point out some facts about the study that might make that big number seem a bit less scary.

For one thing the study was only conducted in Ontario, Canada. In terms of sample size, that is one city in a country with very specific cannabis laws so to lay the blanket term “legalization” over one very specific set of laws isn’t totally accurate. The study even says so in the introduction:

“Another study also found no increase in total traffic injury hospitalizations in Canada over 2.5 years following legalization. Critically, the slow rollout of the cannabis retail market in Canada and the overlap of the legalization period with the COVID-19 pandemic greatly reduces the ability of these studies to evaluate the impacts of legalization,” the study said.

It’s also important to understand that the total number of injury-causing traffic accidents involving cannabis in the 13-year period came to a grand total of 426 out of 947,604. That number as a percentage is .04%, which is even smaller when compared to the total number of traffic accidents without taking emergency room visits into account. It’s hardly insignificant, but it is, arguably, a much less daunting number at first glance than 475.3%.

One key piece of data the study highlighted was that men appear to be more at risk than women of being involved in such accidents where cannabis intoxication was considered a factor. This stands to reason as a 2016 study by the National Institute of Health found men to use cannabis far more often than women and in greater amounts per use.

“Of the 418 individuals with documented cannabis involvement, 330 (78.9%) were male, 109 (25.6%) were aged 16 to 21 years (mean [SD] age at visit, 30.6 [12.0] years), and 113 (27.0%) had an ED visit or hospitalization for substance use in the 2 years before their traffic injury ED visit,” the study said.

The last and arguably most important question one must ask when dissecting the results of a study is “who paid for this?” Studies cost money, and it goes without saying that people who have money often try to use that money to influence the results of otherwise scientifically sound methods of observation. This is America after all (Or Canada, in this case). However, this study was funded in its entirety by grants from the Canadian Institute of Health and the University of Ottawa, meaning there does not appear to be any private money attempting to sway these results.

Regardless of my nitpicking, this study did point out something important: there is a small but statistically significant chance that a link between cannabis legalization and severe traffic accidents exists, but more context and study is needed to be sure.

“The findings of this repeated cross-sectional study suggest that cannabis-involved severe traffic injuries have increased over time. Legalization of nonmedical cannabis with widespread retail access and increased cannabis product variety may have further increased these visits despite laws specifically aimed at deterring cannabis-impaired driving,” the study said. “Younger adults and males appear to be at particularly increased risk of cannabis-involved traffic injuries. There is a potential need for greater interventions, including education on cannabis-impaired driving, enforcement activities, and policies to regulate access to commercial retail markets.”

 

[momofthegoons]

Scientists Develop New Method To Test For Recent Marijuana Use With 96% Accuracy In Federally Funded Driving Simulation Study​

Scientists say they’ve identified an alternative way to test for recent marijuana use that’s significantly more accurate than standard THC blood tests that sometimes misrepresent a person’s potential impairment depending on frequently they use cannabis. And they’re actively working to build on that research with an expanded study.

The initial study, which was funded in part by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and published in the journal Clinical Toxicology, could have key criminal justice implications, as police currently rely on basic THC blood tests for evidence of possible intoxication in criminal investigations, such as after car accidents.

But as the researchers from the University of Colorado (UC) point out, that testing standard can be unreliable, especially for frequent cannabis users.

“Since THC accumulates and lingers in fat tissue, daily cannabis users may maintain constant elevations of THC in the blood even long after the psychoactive effects abate,” Michael Kosnett, an associate adjunct professor and cannabis researcher at UC’s Colorado School of Public Health, said in a press release.

A more accurate method of testing for recent marijuana use, the researchers found, is by analyzing the molar metabolite ratio of THC to THC-COOH in the blood. If a person’s ratio of the active and inactive metabolites meets or exceeds a 0.18 cut-off point, “you can feel pretty confident (with 98 percent specificity) that the person just used within the past 30 minutes.”

They tested this approach by having 24 occasional and 32 daily marijuana consumers participate in a driving simulator exercise. Participants had their blood analyzed at a baseline and then 30 minutes after a 15-minute smoking interval.

The study revealed that the molar metabolite ratio of THC to THC-COOH, at a 0.18 cut-off, yielded results with 98 percent specificity (meaning there is a two percent false positive rate), 93 percent sensitivity (meaning the test only fails to detect recent use seven percent of the time) and 96 percent accuracy (a combination of those two rates).

By comparison, testing for THC alone “yielded 88 percent specificity, 73 percent sensitivity and 80 percent accuracy.”

“The principle behind the study is basically, you’re looking at active drug versus inactive drug—because THC and hydroxy-THC are active and carboxy-THC is inactive. So it makes sense that soon after you smoke cannabis, you’re going to have relatively more of the active forms present,” Kosnett told Marijuana Moment. “As the ratio of active forms to inactive forms decreases, the more likely that the active form present represents the tail-end or residual of smoking that occurred many hours ago.”

In a prior study, the researchers also assessed driving ability during a simulation, and notably they found that daily cannabis consumers had an average five times the THC concentration in their blood after the 30-minute mark compared to occasional users—yet the latter group “showed evidence of decrement in their driving skills, whereas that wasn’t statistically significant in the daily users.”

One limitation of the more recent study was that the blood was tested 30 minutes after consuming, but in real life scenarios such as after a car accident, it could take longer before a person is tested. The researchers say they are working to analyze the molar metabolite ratio of more participants at different time intervals.

Another limitation, Kosnett said, is that you “can’t conclude that just because the ratio was elevated in and of itself with this test that the person was impaired.”

“We’re working on that too. But I think, even right now, this work is helpful,” he said. “When you are using a test that has implications for people’s jobs or for convictions, you generally want to have something that’s very specific. With this test’s specificity of 98 percent, we can have high confidence that this isn’t a false positive.”

The researcher said they are currently recruiting a larger pool of participants for a follow-up study that will assess the molar metabolite ratio at different time intervals, rather than just after the 30-minute mark.

“We’re going to be checking again with a larger data set, which is always better,” he said.

Last summer, a congressional report for a Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies (THUD) bill said that the House Appropriations Committee “continues to support the development of an objective standard to measure marijuana impairment and a related field sobriety test to ensure highway safety.”

Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-CO) sent a letter to the Department of Transportation (DOT) in 2022 seeking an update on that status of a federal report into research barriers that are inhibiting the development of a standardized test for marijuana impairment on the roads. The department was required to complete the report by November under a large-scale infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed, but it missed that deadline and it’s unclear how much longer it will take.

A study published in 2019 concluded that those who drive at the legal THC limit—which is typically between two to five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood—were not statistically more likely to be involved in an accident compared to people who haven’t used marijuana.

Separately, the Congressional Research Service in 2019 determined that while “marijuana consumption can affect a person’s response times and motor performance … studies of the impact of marijuana consumption on a driver’s risk of being involved in a crash have produced conflicting results, with some studies finding little or no increased risk of a crash from marijuana usage.”

Another study from 2022 found that smoking CBD-rich marijuana had “no significant impact” on driving ability, despite the fact that all study participants exceeded the per se limit for THC in their blood.