As legal weed begins to settle into normalcy for lucky residents of Colorado and Washington, stoned driving has been thrust into the spotlight harder than Kim and Kanye's spawn, North, who isn't even that cool. But there's a slight problem; current weed breathalyzer technology sucks. Although it can detect the presence of THC on someone's breath, it can't measure actual impairment.
As legal weed begins to settle into normalcy for lucky residents of Colorado and Washington, stoned driving has been thrust into the spotlight harder than Kim and Kanye's spawn, North, who isn't even that cool.
Stoned drivers retain mental capacities drunk drivers lack, like short-term memory and problem solving. Stoned drivers also underestimate their driving skill rather than overestimate it. Still, weed appears to cause roughly a twofold increase in your risk of a crash. It's that reality that has ushered in technological innovations in the weed breathalyzer arena. Determined to keep high motorists from merging into traffic at 3 m.p.h while eating Flamin' Hot Cheetoes, researchers have been scrambling for a breath test that'll weed out (pun!) stoned drivers from drivers who just suck at driving.
But there's a slight problem; current weed breathalyzer technology sucks. Although it can detect the presence of THC on someone's breath, it can't measure actual impairment.
Still, researchers recently published a document in Clinical Chemistry that suggests a breath test may be the best way for police to analyze a driver's THC level. Researchers believe that the breath method of testing could eventually phase out the controversial THC-blood test.
When researchers tested the capacity of their weed breathalyzer, they found was that while every breath sample collected tested positive for THC almost immediately following the participant getting high, the only group to maintain a positive test after four hours were the everyday stoners. And that's scarier for a stoner than running out of Lunchables pizza; the finding indicates that people who smoke the most often will be the most likely to be labeled as “impaired” during a roadside test, when in reality, they might not be high up at all.
Consider that implication from the perspective of a medical user, someone who needs to smoke everyday to function. While these people may be driving with all the careful responsibility in the world, current weed breathalyzers will categorize them as impaired.
That's pretty unfair to the Cheeches and Chongs of the world, especially considering researchers also found that while 90% of the part-time smokers tested positive for THC within an hour of smoking, none of them tested positive after about 90 minutes. So, according to the standards of current technology, you're more likely to get off the hook if your limit your weed intake to special occasions, like National Pizza Day … even if you're kind of baked.
Based on these findings, an accurate marijuana breathalyzer would only be effective on part-time users for somewhere between 30 minutes to two hours immediately following that bong rip.
Translation: current cannabis breathalyzers are shit. But that doesn't stop them from existing.
Take the Cannabix Breathalyzer, today's hottest accidentally-incriminating technology. It was developed by a Canadian mounty to deter the average person from getting behind the wheel while stoned, and can detect whether a motorist has consumed marijuana in the past two hours. It's the best option there is so far, since it measures THC, not cannabinoids, which stays in your system for a shorter amount of time, but it's still not a perfect system when you consider regular stoner's tolerence. Regardless, the thing will be licensed in North America.
So when it comes to the question of whether we'll ever have an accurate cannabis breathalyzer, the answer is maybe … if we can tweak current technology to register both accurate blood levels of THC regardless of frequency of use, and, more importantly, impairment. People react in wildly different ways to wildly different amounts of weed, and until there's an instrument fine-tuned enough to consider how variable the effects of pot are, it's gonna be a “no” for us.
In the meantime, what you're most likely to see happen is the use of technology like the Cannabix alongside the same beloved roadside acrobatics cops subject drunk drivers to. If you want, you can come over and practice your nose-touches and straight-line-walking with us later.
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