The dangers of drunk driving are well known and indisputable, but the tie between marijuana and traffic accidents is much shakier.
Recreational marijuana is legal in nine states and the District of Columbia. Oakland, California-based Hound Labs Inc. has created a marijuana breathalyzer test it says will make roads safer and hold drivers accountable, USA Today reported.
With its marijuana-breathalyzer, Hound Labs says it hopes to offer an objective determination of recent marijuana use rather than one based on a police officers’ judgment. But while drivers with a blood alcohol level above .08 percent are considered DUI, it’s still up for debate in the science community what exactly qualifies a driver under the influence of marijuana as impaired.
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Most Americans think that driving while high on marijuana isn’t that big of a deal, according to a recent Gallup poll. Just 29 percent of respondents said it was a very serious problem vs. 70 percent who think driving while drunk is a very serious problem.
Marijuana has been linked to impaired coordination, memory loss, delayed reaction times, and difficulty problem solving, the CDC wrote on its website.
However, data on the dangers of driving while high is lacking. A roadside test for drug levels has yet be created, according to the CDC.
New data from the University of Michigan shows that 51 percent of medical marijuana users polled in a survey said they’d driven within two hours of using the substance, Insider.com reported.
Hound Labs claims that its device is hypersensitive, allowing it to pick up any THC — the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana — on drivers’ breath.
“The Hound breathalyzer is 1 billion times more sensitive than today’s alcohol breathalyzers,” the company says on its site.
At present, police officers who suspect a driver is impaired can test blood, breath or urine samples, but such tests can be inaccurate. Those tests also detect if the driver was high that day or week, rather than if they were high while operating the vehicle, USA Today reported.
Impairments caused by marijuana correlate with just modest reductions in driving performance in driving simulations, according to a 2009 study in the American Journal of Addictions.
When someone blows into the Hound Labs breathalyzer, it can determine within a couple of minutes whether there is alcohol, THC or both in the person’s system. Since THC is only present in someone’s breath during a peak two-hour window, the driver is considered impaired when it’s detected.
