Altought it can sound weird, it really seems that stoned drivers are good ones. Several researchs have been made in the last 2 decades, and all of them seems to show that stoned drivers have little or not disability compared to “normal”, or “sober” drivers. These studies comes from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), that is for sure an unbiased source. In the first set of tests dated 1983, the NHTSA suggested that the ablity of the stoned and the normal driver are similar. Further the stoned driver was classified as safe because he drived at a considerably lower speed than the regular driver. After a decade, in 1993 the NHTSA came to Holland to test the abilities of the Dutch stoned driver: in this circumstance they arrived to the conclusion that the only difference between the regula and the stoned driver is a little bit more difficult to “maintain a steady lateral position on the road” so to drive exactly in the center of the line. In 1998, the University of Adelaide and Transport South Australia tested 2500 blood samples of people  involved in car accidents: nome of the accidents was because of the cannabis, and the incredible result was that drivers with only cannabis in their systems were slightly less likely to cause accidents than those without. Drivers that have used  both marijuana and alcohol did have a high accident responsibility rate. So the final result of this large serie of tests was “there was no indication that marijuana by itself was a cause of fatal accidents”. Further studies commissioned in the last 5 years by the Canadian and the Dutch government have confirmed these results. These data show once again how senseless is the prohibitionism on cannabis.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Politic, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.