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Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

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Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#31

Post by Y_Y »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #19
epistasis wrote: post #7

Based on the headline, I was guessing it was any amount of positivity, and may be close to the population level, but it's actually impairment levels of THC: > In a review of 246 deceased drivers, 41.9% tested positive for active THC in their blood, with an average level of 30.7 ng/mL — far exceeding most state impairment limits. Since COVID in CA, it feels like driving has become far more dangerous with much more law…

reading the paper, I’d say this is a case of hoofbeats meaning horses- people are just getting high and crashing.. Although, this seems like a case where the average is very vulnerable to a ‘spiders georg’ type distortion, especially because of the tolerances people build.

> "average person eats 3 spiders a year" factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#32

Post by tokai »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #28
tokai wrote: post #13

An issue with having the legal limit at ~2-5ng/ml is that it makes habitual users be over the limit if they have smoked recently or not.[0] Making the prohibition seem unserious to some, not about safety but about punitive control, and in turn making it matter less if you smoke and drive as you are taking the risk of getting into trouble in any case. The impairments of driving under the influence of alcohol have been…

Opening the article would have allowed you to see that the average was 30.7 ng/mL, it's in the very first bullet point!

If you calmed down and stopped snapping at everyone, you might understand that I'm writing about how the law and a lack of studies could make some people more willing to drive high. You are substantially diminishing the quality of the discussion here.

Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#33

Post by terminalshort »

tokai wrote: post #13

An issue with having the legal limit at ~2-5ng/ml is that it makes habitual users be over the limit if they have smoked recently or not.[0] Making the prohibition seem unserious to some, not about safety but about punitive control, and in turn making it matter less if you smoke and drive as you are taking the risk of getting into trouble in any case. The impairments of driving under the influence of alcohol have been…

But the truth is that habitual users are always impaired. Source: former habitual user.

Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#34

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #28
tokai wrote: post #13

An issue with having the legal limit at ~2-5ng/ml is that it makes habitual users be over the limit if they have smoked recently or not.[0] Making the prohibition seem unserious to some, not about safety but about punitive control, and in turn making it matter less if you smoke and drive as you are taking the risk of getting into trouble in any case. The impairments of driving under the influence of alcohol have been…

Opening the article would have allowed you to see that the average was 30.7 ng/mL, it's in the very first bullet point!

using a mean rather than median is fairly odd here. a mean is pretty much worthless without knowing distribution shape.

Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#36

Post by kube-system »

witte wrote: post #15

This feels like we’re missing a dimension or threeve, the one that comes to mind immediately would be whether or not the deceased driver was at fault for the incident.

Yeah, drug use is also influenced by social and economic status, which also influences driving risks. People of lower socioeconomic status drive less safe cars on less safe roads for longer commutes. This is something valid to evaluate with a drug like THC which is detectable long after use. It would be nice to see the distribution of levels detected and not just the average.

Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#37

Post by gpm »

watwut wrote: post #24
iLoveOncall wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It would give better context to a dead drivers testing positive for THC. No it wouldn't. People make those excuses because it's weed, but you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol.

It absolutely would. If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect. I find it unlikely 40% of people test positive for THC, but yes, it does matter.

That wouldn't actually mean no effect, you need 40% of people driving to test positive for it to be no effect. It's unlikely the population driving is equivalent to the population at large - for one there's a set of responsible people who won't drive while high. For another weed use isn't randomly distributed through the population but correlated with certain subsets, which probably have a non-average rate of driving just by coincidence.

(Not that it really matters since I don't buy for a second that anywhere near 40% of people/people-driving are high at any given time. I also don't put much faith in numbers in the abstract of a a yet-to-be-published study...)

Re: Over 40% of deceased drivers in vehicle crashes test positive for THC: Study

#39

Post by dragonwriter »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #28
tokai wrote: post #13

An issue with having the legal limit at ~2-5ng/ml is that it makes habitual users be over the limit if they have smoked recently or not.[0] Making the prohibition seem unserious to some, not about safety but about punitive control, and in turn making it matter less if you smoke and drive as you are taking the risk of getting into trouble in any case. The impairments of driving under the influence of alcohol have been…

Opening the article would have allowed you to see that the average was 30.7 ng/mL, it's in the very first bullet point!

The average (presumably arithmetic mean, though it could technically be any of a wide variety of measures) is not particulatly interesting, the median specifically would be more interesting, as a single figure.
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