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Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

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Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#71

Post by antisthenes »

> Even if the driver had smoked cannabis one minute before the traffic stop, the driver’s blood plasma THC level would have fallen 80%-90% in the first hour after ingestion, and even more so after two and a half hours.

Can you source this claim from your front page? And if it is correct, how are you making sure the police correlate impairment with THC levels correctly?

If someone smoked 2-3 hours before driving, wouldn't even your device fail in this case? What thresholds are you using?

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#72

Post by wolco »

Noah_SannTek wrote: post #56
legitster wrote: post #41

I for one wish you the best of luck, and hope you develop an effective and accurate product. While I may have conflicting feelings about police municipalities and the justice system, the breathalyzer has overwhelmingly been a good thing, and has saved countless lives by keeping the roads safe. Questions: - What do you think the likelihood/timeline is that these tests will eventually be comparable in speed and accurac…

Hey! We appreciate the support, and I hope that this response will highlight the fact that we're engineers by trade, and are completely data-driven. We're not going to be selling anything, until there's the peer-reviewed research to back it up. Here's where we're at: - Speed isn't so much of a problem. Accuracy is by-far the most important piece of this puzzle. I think it will be between 12-18 months until we see rea…

This could be used routinely in placed where any drug use is illegal more easily compared to a breathe test which could result in mass arrests.

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#73

Post by chadash »

jabits wrote: post #68
danappelxx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not about the war on drugs, this is about making roads safer. Driving under the influence is illegal whether the influencing drug is legal or not.

Driving under the influence should be detected by professional law enforcement observation. This can be easily backed up with video footage. Then if suspected after being pulled over, tested clinically. This is not that difficult. Even if a certain level of any substance is detected and measured, level of impairment is not.

> Driving under the influence should be detected by professional law enforcement observation.

It is. I've been pulled over a few times in my life. Never had a breathalyzer test done, because they assumed (correctly) that I hadn't been drinking. But human observation is far from perfect. And even harder to defend in court.

> Then if suspected after being pulled over, tested clinically. This is not that difficult.

What does "tested clinically" mean. If you mean a breathalyzer for cannabis, well then that's what this is. If you mean a blood test, well, it's pretty hard to get someone to a lab in time to detect meaningful levels of THC from recent smoking, as the poster of the Launch HN notes. It is pretty difficult.

> Even if a certain level of any substance is detected and measured, level of impairment is not.

This is tricky. As with alcohol, different people have different tolerances. Some people can have one drink and feel tipsy, others don't feel it at all. So we set a legal limit for how much alcohol you can have in your blood, regardless of how you feel. You have to draw the line somewhere and we've decided as a society to set it at a point that's more conservative in order to reduce accidents related to drunk driving. And there are plenty of drunk driving accidents. This would do the same thing with pot. Yes, you might feel perfectly fine, but I don't want your subjective opinion of how well you think you can drive under the influence of marijuana to be the determining factor in whether we let you drive after smoking pot or not. If you want to smoke, stay put or take an uber.

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#74

Post by Noah_SannTek »

slg wrote: post #64
Noah_SannTek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We absolutely consider ethical implications for bringing this product to market. We currently live in a world where it's a "free-for-all", and officers establish reasonable suspicion, which leads to an arrest, without any objective evidence. We hypothesize that this is part of the reason why there's a higher number of PoC arrested. This doesn't happen with alcohol, because there is an objective device.

I'm sorry, but this is just not true. People are innocent until proven guilty. If there is no evidence, then they aren't convicted (EDIT: for the record, testimony is evidence). Adding an avenue to collect more evidence is going to cause more people to be convicted. Sure, you will probably get some people exonerated, but there is no question that you will get a larger number of people convicted. I am not going to wei…

Apologies, one thing I forgot to mention is that once reasonable suspicion is established, and an arrest happens, if you aren't blowing over 0.08 for alcohol, police will request a blood test. It's possible that for frequent users, THC will show up in these blood tests even though they haven't recently smoked. If an officer screens you on our device (which only has a 3 hour window of detection) and there is no THC, they have no further reason to request a blood test. Thoughts?

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#75

Post by InitialLastName »

i_am_nomad wrote: post #47
svnpenn wrote: post #16

The war on drugs has ruined literally millions of lives: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#Arrests_and_incarcer... with all due respect, I hope you fail miserably.

That seems like a pretty harsh thing to say - intoxicated driving has also ruined quite a few lives.

Driving has ruined quite a few lives, but we don't ban that.

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#76

Post by reroute1 »

Noah_SannTek wrote: post #62
reroute1 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but also comparing driving under the influence of alcohol with driving under the influence of cannabis is definitely not congruent.

This gets us to a weird gray zone of.. how impaired is too impaired? Many would say that any level of impaired is not ok, and I would definitely agree. Check out what the national highway traffic safety administration has to say about this: https://feeldifferentdrivedifferent.org/

-> Many would say that any level of impaired is not ok Many would also disagree, including the law which in my state allows a BAC of up to .08 to not be charged.

In general my opinion is that .08 BAC sounds reasonable and an equivalent of MJ "could" be also. But most cases that would be a huge amount of MJ, and still doesn't relate to the effects noticed at high consumption of alcohol. IE I have never seen someone smoke so much they black out and cannot control themselves. Whereas that's happening every night people go out drinking.

My view is that there is no good way to measure this universally among all people, and MJ "impaired" driving is a non-issue compared with Drunk Driving.

Should we test people for driving on caffeiene? What about after eating too much and being sleepy? These are effects on par and just judgement calls people need to make. If the officer can smell weed\finds it then that seems appropriate and enough.

EDIT: To the points below about people passing out or cops calling 911 on themselves that speaks to the incredible variety of experience people have and what someone might experience their first time with edibles. It's not comparable to the effects smoking has on regular users, and not something anyone should be doing while driving, but how do you test for that with a Breathalyzer?

Fair points but I think this testing is only about smoking? That would seem to give even less reason to support this kind of testing since it misses the most egregious cases of edibles. I think anyone would agree that people in that kind of state are in no condition to drive, but again in my experience way outside of normal usage and not something I have ever seen. If the test took that into account alright, but it seems like these breathalyzer would be detecting a far lower threshold

Double Edit: "Theyre working on it" when it comes to edibles....

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#77

Post by vngzs »

chadash wrote: post #49
woah wrote: post #4

Sounds like it’s well-intentioned, but I’m afraid that given the incentives of all parties involved here, and the complexity of the technology, there will be a lot of false positives. It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions, no point in disputing that. I’m wondering if you can elaborate on what incentives your company has to produce accurate devices, against your customer’s unst…

> What’s keeping you in check? It's going to be fairly easy to test this. You take one group of people who haven't smoked in the last few hours and you test them. Make sure it doesn't go off. You take another group who have smoked (I'm sure plenty of college students would be happy to sign up for this trial) and you test them, make sure it does go off. It's pretty simple. It's a machine with an empirical number, so y…

Even alcohol breathalyzers are regularly miscalibrated or defective and found to produce false positives. Legal pressure from manufacturers keeps this quiet.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/draeger-breathalyzer-breath-te...

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#78

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

wolco wrote: post #66
i_am_nomad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a pretty harsh thing to say - intoxicated driving has also ruined quite a few lives.

Quite a few? Would love to see stats or at least personal stories where this was the case.

Are you looking for statistics with marjiuana or impairment in general?

Re: Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis

#80

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

codingdave wrote: post #70
cmiles74 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's legal where I live and the drivers on the road have not changed significantly. For those opposed to legal cannabis use, it's easy to blame any traffic infraction on cannabis. I don't think we have data available that backs up that hypothesis. In areas where cannabis has been legalized for recreational use, the incidence of traffic accidents has remained the same. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24417

> I don't think we have data available that backs up that hypothesis. I think this is another key point in favor of this device. The traffic safety data that exists comes from police reports. Each officer has to key in the information when they handle an accident, so having a device like this in the hands of those officers is the first step in starting to build that kind of data set.

That's great assuming the device is accurate, precise, and repeatable. It's not clear that breathalyzers can achieve these either but the legal system loves using them as a conviction tool. This could be yet another addition to their dowsing rod toolkit.
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