It doesn’t get much more ignorant than a question like this: “How high is too high to drive?”
But then to make that the headline title recently on the front page of the Sacramento Bee makes it sound like the editor was “too high to edit the news”. Maybe it was “4:20” when the Maclatchy Washington Bureau decided to pick the title for the story by Rob Hotakainen.
Rob writes the following ridiculous paragraph in the article:
“With the push to legalize marijuana surging in popularity, states want to assure the public that roads will be safe. But they face a perplexing question: How stoned is too stoned to drive?”
He goes on to quote an “expert” on the topic, professor of public policy at UCLA who served as Washington state’s top “drug consultant” who says: “The answer is pretty damned stoned is not as dangerous as drunk.”
What’s absurd about this is, “pretty damned stoned” is very dangerous. This fact is obvious to the mind of a garden snail. The difference between marijuana and alcohol is, you smoke a joint and you get “pretty damned stoned”…but you drink a glass of wine or a beer (No I’m not talking GUZZLE it) and most people are not even what is referred to as “buzzed”. In other words, people can and most people do drink alcohol responsibly.
Personally, I rarely drink, and if I do it is one, maybe two beers or glasses of wine over at least 2 hours or more. But dope users can’t smoke dope responsibly. You smoke it for the explicit purpose of getting “pretty damned stoned”. If you think you are responsible if you do drugs for “recreation”, you are lying to yourself and setting a horribly irresponsible example for any young people in your life.
“Recreational drug use” by definition is behavior engaged in by irresponsible individuals with low character, looking to escape dealing with life in a responsible, healthy and sober way. The fact that our culture and the media in America is more and more not sending the right healthy message to kids about the dangers of recreational drug use is a very sick sign that our country is headed in the wrong direction. No city, no state, no elected officials should ever drool at the prospect of profiting off of the taxes from legalizing “recreational” drug use in their communities.
Back to the Sacramento Bee article…To say “pretty damned stoned” is not as dangerous as drunk is like saying playing Russian roulette with a .38 special is not as dangerous as playing it with a .44 magnum. They’re both “pretty damned dangerous”, but the Sacramento Bee has a lot of dope advocates among their readership to appease I suppose.
“How high is too high to drive”…I don’t know, how high is too high for your babysitter to watch your kids? You think the two aren’t the same? Of course they are. You are on the road in your car with your kids at the same time untold numbers of dopers are on the road. If they are smoking a joint because they read this stupid “expert’s” opinion that being high isn’t as dangerous as being drunk, your kids lives are still very much in danger as if they were drunk behind the wheel.
“HOW HIGH IS TOO HIGH TO WORK IN A NEWS ROOM?”
How high is too high to drive” is just a retarded question, period. It would be like someone wondering, “How many STD’s are too many for me to have sex with a prostitute?” News organizations should be more responsible than to write such “eye candy” articles that at least on the surface appear to infer that one could smoke a joint and not be dangerous behind the wheel.
If you haven’t heard, Columbia University did a big study of thousands of traffic crash fatalities over a 10 year period between 1999 and 2010. They discovered that driving while stoned TRIPLED, and did so in all age groups and both sexes. They found that marijuana/cannabis was the predominant drug found in those fatalities who were under the influence of drugs and not alcohol. Here is a link to the study:http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/01/27/aje.kwt327
Connie Bryan
(Connie Bryan is a comedian and editorial writer in Sacramento, Ca. Read more of Connie’s opeds on her blog at www.conniebryan.com)
What a sophmoric, poorly thought out rant, but that’s the internet for you.
First of all “deejay”, you don’t even know how to spell the word…it has an O after the M: “SOPHOMORIC”…”Of or related to or characteristic of a sophomore…pretentious or juvenile”. It’s too easy for hateful types on the internet to make negative comments, but as in your case, they hardly ever make any real contribution for society with their negative comments. You couldn’t even say what you thought was “juvenile” about the oped in your attacking comment. I’m guessing you are a doper at a minimum “deejay”, and what you think is juvenile about it are my statements that point out the low character, bad example and irresponsibility of those who do drugs for “recreation” and try to minimize the danger associated with “driving while stoned”, etc.