Does Cannabis Affect your Control Behind The Wheel?

2009.05.03

Well, there are many, many questions about cannabis and its effects on people. Does it impair judgment, motor skills, or does it act as a psychoactive, impairing performance, and thought rationalization? What is it about weed that sparks so much controversy?

There are so many tests out there that also say that cannabis or marijuana, or any of the countless other street names it has, have an addictive effect on people. Until now, there has been no conclusive proof that pot has any adverse effect on anything, even driving.
But there are recent studies that do show that marijuana can be addictive and can impair a judgment, and the way that these studies found it is in heavy users, there they have found addictive problems that lead sometimes to heavier drug use, to fits of anxiety and sometimes panic, and to an addiction for more grass, because the user has to have more of it to get the buzz they crave because there are larger THC levels in the system that make it necessary to increase intake to get that buzz.
 
But the real question, for the purposes of this piece, is – Does cannabis affect your control behind the wheel? Sure it’s against the law to drive while under the influence of marijuana, of course using the assumption that it has the effects of alcohol where perception, coordination and reflex are all impaired.

It has been found in California that marijuana undoubtedly impairs psychomotor function and that may impair driving, especially in high doses taken by inexperienced users, however to the contrary in many driver simulator tests it was found that marijuana had only an occasional effect, where the findings for alcohol were that its effects were consistent and significant in causing impairment. In fact, accident and speeding tickets were increased at a steady rate, those same infractions with cannabis or marijuana in conjunction with alcohol did not occur.

A department of transport report said that THC is not a profoundly impairing drug, it just affects the information processing, but not to the point where he can’t perform as he needs to while driving. Studies abound where they tried to determine if THC caused driving impairment, but they found that the THC levels in plasma, when measured according to the road sobriety tests had no effect on driving skills or in actual performance under the influence of THC.

Researchers found that it doesn’t appear possible to determine whether THC concentrations in the plasma could influence anything about driver impairment. It would appear that the many studies done, (too numerous to list here) were unable to reach a conclusion about marijuana or its psychoactive chemical, THC having any influence whatsoever on driver performance.

So it appears that no conclusive evidence has been found to establish that cannabis, or marijuana, its psychoactive chemical, THC impair driving at all, but it is still illegal, not like alcohol, which does impair.