MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION USA.
What everyone needs to know. Jonathan P Caulkins, Angela Hawken, Beau Kilomer, Mark A R KleimanAll of the above mentioned names and persons are professors in their line of expertise. The book itself has been purchased from bargain books. And in this particular case the book was sent to SA on request. Price = R150.
Does marijuana use cause automobile crashes?(1) being stoned impairs driving performance.(2) Even the pro-legalization National organization for the reform of marijuana laws includes “No driving among its principles of responsible marijuana use” this simply means do not drive while stoned..(3) The question is just how dangerous it is.(4) The answer seems to be that driving stoned isn’t as dangerous as driving drunk but driving under the influence of both drugs. Is worse than either by itself.(5) That leaves open the question of how much marijuana adds to the risks of driving, both in terms of the of a crash and in terms of the contribution of marijuana to the overall rate of accidents and fatalities.(6) If someone is in a traffic accident and has a positive urine test for marijuana, that shows past use but not necessarily current intoxication: to measure the current level of the drug requires a mouth swab or a blood test. It poses problems for the law enforcement officers trying to access whether or not someone was under the influence of a controlled substance if there is any evidence of having any THC in their system, regardless of impairment. Thus someone could be punished for intoxicated driving as a result of marijuana use days before the incident.
Yale psychiatrist Richard Sewell and his colleagues reviewed this literature and concluded that: (1) Use may inpair some driving skills (Automatic functions such as tracking) but different skills (complex functions that require conscious control) are njot impaired until higher doses, and cannabis users tend to compensate effectively for their deficits by driving more carefully. Unexpected events are still too difficult to handle under the influence of marijuana, however, and the combination of low dose alcohol and low-dose cannabis causes much more impairment than either dry uised alone.
The more recent reviews of the epidemiological literature conclude that marijuana does increase the risk of traffic accidents. Room and colleagues argue that “better-controlled epidemiological studies have recently provided credible evidence that cannabis users who drive while intoxicated are at increased risk of motor-vehicle crashes “Similarly, a 2011 meta-analysis by the Mu-Chen Li of Columbia university and colleagues finds that the risk of a crash rises in a dose-response fashion with the amount of THC consumed.
There are official statistics in the United States suggesting that marijuana can kill.The centres for disease Control’s WONDER database reports that there were twenty-six deaths between 1999 and 2007 coded as mental and behavioural disorders d8ue to the use of cannabinoids with 10 different sub catagories. Half of the 26 deaths were attributed to the dependence syndrome.
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