are marijuana related accidents underreported?

if I am sceptical about the rush to marijuana legalization (which has followed a lot of exaggerated one sided hype by the PC) it is because I saw how drugs and alcohol have decimated the inner cities and the Indian reservations where I have worked.

The difference between Alcohol and marijuana is the half life.

One drink/one beer/on ounce alcohol will normally be detoxified by the liver in one hour. It will raise your blood alcohol to 0.05 (slightly higher in small women).

In other words, even after a bender, it's usually out of your system quickly (which is why pilots have to refrain from alcohol for only 12 hours).

On the other hand, a single joint, even todays very concentrated marijuana, is low level when it comes to intoxication. You may get a rush, but then it settles down into the fat. But if you smoke several tokes a day, you end up with a steady state that doesn't go away, sometimes for months.

This is also the problem with Valium, where I have accidentally induced low respirations after using  for five days in a very complicated alcoholic withdrawal in a bad drunk. (Luckily, there is an anecdote)

So if you smoked a lot over the weekend, you are still intoxicated for days. So one horrible accident where two women died, the teenager had a negative blood alcohol (but the family of the dead women shouted at her that it was her fault because they knew her as a heavy marijuana smoker).

But since the tests are lousy, to check the level you have to do a pee test, which is hard t€o do when you are busy saving someone's life after a car accident.

Ditto for the "walk the line" test: We had one guy who was regularly stoned while working as a nursing assistant, but when I was called in to check if he was intoxicated, the test was negative.

from the NYTimes:

Score well on all three of these Olympic events, and there’s a very good chance that you are not drunk...

But it is nowhere near as good at spotting a stoned driver.

In a 2012 study published in the journal Psychopharmacology, only 30 percent of people under the influence of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, failed the field test. And its ability to identify a stoned driver seems to depend heavily on whether the driver is accustomed to being stoned.

A 21-year-old on his first bender and a hardened alcoholic will both wobble on one foot. But the same is not necessarily true of a driver who just smoked his first joint and the stoner who is high five days a week. In another study, 50 percent of the less frequent smokers failed the field test.

of course, being the NYTimes, they find experts to claim being high on weed is not as dangerous as being drunk.

Yeah. I heard that about violent crime too...tell that to our beaten women and the child we buried after his weed happy father shook him to death.

And the NYTimes argument that it slows people down, so they don't speed, misses the real problem: Essentially you are tranquillizing them. Child neglect, not able to hold jobs, and shoddy workmanship are the result.

my opinion is that the legalization is more about keeping the underclass from rebelling, and maybe about keeping the children of the late middle class from getting angry.

But then, I have Irish genes, and the Brits kept the Irish under control with cheap whiskey, the slums of London quiet with cheap gin, and of course the Americans gave "fire water" to the Native Americans to steal their land.