Rep. John Mica:Legal pot means "phenomenal devastation" on our highways

[urbanlibertarian]

http://reason.com/archives/2014/08/11/stoned-drivers-the-case-against-panic

Stoned Drivers: The Case Against Panic
Pot prohibitionists undermine their own warnings about legalization and car crashes.
Jacob Sullum | August 11, 2014

If marijuana is legalized, John Mica warned at a recent congressional hearing, there will be blood. "In the last dozen years," the Florida Republican said, "we've had [half] a million Americans slaughtered on the highways...and half of those fatalities are related to people who are impaired through alcohol or drugs." Legal pot will compound this "phenomenal devastation," he said, since "we are going to have a lot more people stoned on the highway."

Mica, a proud pot prohibitionist who chairs a subcommittee of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, convened the hearing to raise an alarm about the deadly threat that legalization poses to anyone navigating the roads and highways. But by the end of the hearing, anyone who was paying attention recognized that his grim prophecies have little basis in fact.

Start with the "phenomenal devastation" that Mica described. When asked how many of those deaths can be attributed to marijuana, Jeff Michael, associate administrator for research and program development at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), replied, "That's difficult to say....We don't have a precise estimate." The most he was willing to affirm was that the number is "probably not" zero.

Michael was much more confident on the subject of alcohol-related traffic deaths. In 2012, he said, based on data from NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), "10,322 people died in crashes in which the driver had a blood-alcohol [level] above the legal limit." NHTSA counted 33,561 traffic fatalities that year, so accidents in which alcohol probably was a factor accounted for 31 percent of the total.

What about marijuana? A 2010 NHTSA analysis found that 18 percent of fatally injured drivers tested positive for drugs other than alcohol in 2009. A total of 3,952 drivers tested positive for psychoactive substances that included prescription and over-the-counter medications as well as illegal drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and PCP. That number is often mistakenly cited as an estimate of deaths caused by drugged driving each year. But some of those drivers also tested positive for alcohol, and even those who had not been drinking were not necessarily impaired by drugs. As NHTSA warned, "drug involvement does not mean the driver was impaired or that drug use was the cause of the crash."

Whole article here: http://reason.com/archives/2014/08/11/stoned-drivers-the-case-against-panic

[Jumpinjack]

Oh, John,  take a puff and loosen up.

[BridgeTroll]

Public Service Announcements in Colorado... 

http://www.youtube.com/v/mDo5MMYxEiM

http://www.youtube.com/v/22jcBvUx3Sw

http://www.youtube.com/v/JP_9F_c0HVo

[funwithteeth]

Except for the driving parts, these PSAs make pot look like a fucking blast.