Obama Drug Policy: Smoke Pot Months Ago, Get a DUI

[Jim Finnel]

If you smoked a joint last week, in eleven states you're as bad as a drunk driver.

From the Obama Administration’s recently released National Drug Control Strategy:

Encourage States To Adopt Per Se Drug Impairment Laws [ONDCP]
State laws regarding impaired driving are varied, but most State codes do not contain a separate offense for driving under the influence of drugs (DUID). Therefore, few drivers are identified, prosecuted, or convicted for DUID. Law enforcement personnel usually cite individuals with the easier to prove driving while intoxicated (DWI) alcohol charges. Unclear laws provide vague signals both to drivers and to law enforcement, thereby minimizing the possible preventive benefit of DUID statutes. Fifteen states have passed laws clarifying that the presence of any illegal drug in a driver’s body is per se evidence of impaired driving. ONDCP will work to expand the use of this standard to other states and explore other ways to increase the enforcement of existing DUID laws.


Here are the states President Obama would like to emulate:

Arizona: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites, mandatory 24 hours jail, up to 6 months upon conviction.
Delaware: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites.
Georgia: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites, mandatory 24 hours jail, up to 12 months upon conviction.
Illinois: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites, up to 12 moths upon conviction.
Indiana: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites, up to 60 days upon conviction.
Michigan: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites, up to 93 days upon conviction, vehicle immobilization for up to 180 days.
Nevada: 15 ng/ml for cannabis metabolites.
Ohio: 15 ng/ml for cannabis metabolites, mandatory 72 hours in jail, up to 6 months upon conviction, 6 month to 3 year license suspension.
Pennsylvania: DUID for cannabis metabolites, amount unclear.
South Dakota: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites for persons under the age of 21.
Utah: Zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites, mandatory 48 hours jail, up to 6 months upon conviction.

Nine of the fifteen states cited have “zero tolerance for cannabis metabolites”. What this means is that if the inactive (read: non-impairing) THC metabolite (THC-COOH) is detected in the urine of a driver, that driver is impaired in the eyes of the law. (There are actually 17 states that have per se DUID laws, but Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Wisconsin exclude metabolites of cannabis). Nevada and Ohio have 15 ng/ml levels which are very low; most workplace pre-employment screenings set the initial screening limit at 50 ng/ml. At the confirmation level of 15 ng/ml, the frequent cannabis user will be positive for perhaps as long as 15 weeks.

Of course, faithful NORML readers and most of the public know that cannabis metabolites can remain detectable in the urine for up to 100 days or longer for a regular cannabis consumer and up to fifteen days for the casual consumer, even after quitting cold turkey. Metabolites in urine don’t tell you a driver is actually impaired, they tell you someone used cannabis, but not when. Even the US Department of Transportation admits that a positive test for drug metabolites is “solid proof of drug use within the last few days, it cannot be used by itself to prove behavioral impairment during a focal event.”

Cannabis metabolites are funny things; they don’t eliminate from the body in any predictable fashion. In fact, when you think about it, a metabolite is produced when the body metabolizes, or breaks down, a substance. The presence of metabolites for THC tells you the body has already broken down the THC! You could actually call a urine screening for metabolites a non-impairment test!

Now some of these laws do have per se standards for actual THC in the blood and you could argue that is a more realistic determinant of current impairment, but do you think most cash-strapped city, county, and state police are going to use an expensive, invasive blood test when a cheap urine screen is available and more likely to get them a conviction for DUID?

These per se DUID “zero tolerance” laws are nothing but discrimination against cannabis users, plain and simple. Metabolites for every other drug, legal and illegal, are eliminated from the body much quicker:

-- PCP (“angel dust”) = up to 2 days detection.
-- ******* (and “crack”) = up to 2-3 days detection.
-- Opiates (******, oxycontin, etc.) = up to 1-2 days detection.
-- Amphetamines (meth, speed) = up to 1-3 days detection.
-- Barbiturates (Seconol, etc.) = up to 3 days detection.
-- Benzodiazepenes (Xanax, Valium, Clonopin, etc.) = up to 2-3 days detection.
-- Alcohol (Budweiser, Jim Beam, Reisling, etc.) = you can actually be considered unimpaired with current blood alcohol levels up to 0.08%, so long as you pass the roadside sobriety test!
-- Cannabis (marijuana, hash, pot) = up to 7-100 days detection.

So you could smoke some dust, snort some coke, shoot some smack, and pop some pills at the party Friday night, and possibly be considered an unimpaired driver by Monday (you could even have a couple of drinks before you got pulled over), but if you smoked a joint last month, in eleven states you could be going to jail and losing your license for endangering the public on the roadways.

These “zero tolerance” laws are criminalizing an entire population – cannabis users – for molecules in their bodies that have nothing to do with impairment or driving ability. Can you imagine the uproar if police harassed drivers based on the melanin content of their skin… whoops, never mind.


NewsHawk: User: 420 MAGAZINE
Source: opposingviews.com
Author: "Radical" Russ Belville
Copyright: 2010 Opposing Views, Inc.
Contact: Contact Us
Website: Opposing Views: Obama Drug Policy: Smoke Pot Months Ago, Get a DUI

• Thanks to MedicalNeed for submitting this article

 

[Oddnonsmoker]

It has always seemed insane to me to conduct drug screenings. They are ineffective at best. If anything, they're counterproductive.

So you could smoke some dust, snort some coke, shoot some smack, and pop some pills at the party Friday night, and possibly be considered an unimpaired driver by Monday (you could even have a couple of drinks before you got pulled over), but if you smoked a joint last month, in eleven states you could be going to jail and losing your license for endangering the public on the roadways.

Is it not the "hard drugs" that we're trying to eliminate from society? Why do we insist on doing something which does almost nothing to further the main goal and instead sideswipes a benign group?

This must stop. For the good of all people.

 

[flank]

It has always seemed insane to me to conduct drug screenings. They are ineffective at best. If anything, they're counterproductive.


Is it not the "hard drugs" that we're trying to eliminate from society? Why do we insist on doing something which does almost nothing to further the main goal and instead sideswipes a benign group?

This must stop. For the good of all people.

The good of the people has become the farthest thing in most suits minds now adays. More money, easier, cheaper, faster, now!

Imagine how much money is going to be streamed and generated from this program if it were ever fully implemented. They know how many people smoke, so if you can catch them AND convict them while they neither have possession or are directly and immediately under the influence, then you can probably double all convictions and arrests and what not....

This is getting out of hand. What are they going to do next, arrest you if you cough because it COULD be from marijuana smoke (which was proven to actually NOT effect the bronchial air ways in any long term negative effects, but that won't matter, those studies are lies, only the government tells us the truth... HEIL GOVERNMENT!

 

[GanjaAL2]

It is his way of justifying more money for the war on drugs and turning this country into a police state... or he could just need funds for health care.

 

[ilynnboy]

Hey Al,
It is all rolled into one.
Obama wants your doctor to piss test you on a routine office call, wants states to start prosecuting for DUID based on mj metabolites in your system.
What are going to have to pee in a cup when pulled over for a sealt belt violation?
What the hell is happening in this country?
I think it is governmental backlash for standing up for ourselves(med mmj, mmj legalization efforts etc.)
We must remain committed or we will be ran over(think pre-war Germany) by our gov.
Do you think the German citizens thought that their jewish citizens should be slaughtered like cattle? I do not think so!!

 

[420DUMPER]

wow info is power

 

[Caber1]

Maybe someone who lives in one of those states could tell us how they could pressure or how they have been pressured into taking a pee test to prove sobriety.
I would be more than happy to take a breathalyzer, but I couldn't see myself being forced to take a piss.

 

[FreakNature]

They could make refusal to pee a cause for loss of license, just like they make refusal to do the breath or blood test.

They'd have to take you in to the station or a private location, or else they'd also be able to get you for public urination. I'm pretty sure they'd have to get me for assault too, since I'd be sure to aim the stream at the attending officers.

 

[Caber1]

Yes, but do they?

If you haven't caused or been part of an accident then they have to make a judgment call that you can dispute and then they would have to take you to court to prove something you didn't do.

Do our already massively overwhelmed courts now have to take this on also?

It seems we have no money left in the system for anything except attacking citizens.

 

[TorturedSoul]

Challenge: In federal jurisdictions as with all states which follow evolutions of English common law (possible exception, Louisana?), the onus of proof of guilt be upon the prosecution. A urinalysis giving a result that is contrary to an arbitrarily-defined (to whit: a matter of convenience to the prosecution and not in any way supported by scientific evidence or other empirical evidence and which, in any case, only purports to demonstrate that the accused consumed a cannabis-containing substance at some time between the time of the urinalysis and up to three months prior to the test) shall not solely be the basis for a successful conviction of the accused.

How's that? Finding someone at the scene of the crime with powder-burns on their hand might well provide enough (arguably, circumstantial) evidence to convict one of murder; however, simply having callouses on one's hand that show that he/she has in the past routinely handled firearms of the same type do not - as there simply is no evidence showing the time(s) that such occurred.

 

[Calimann]

This is really fucking ridiculous. If they care so much, why don't they stake out bars? If potheads were killing as many people as drunks, or even a major road hazard, this would still be fucking ridiculous. I am more dangerous after one beer than after 2 joints, or any amount of weed as far as that goes. I am not advocating driving stoned, just making my point. I have driven drunk and driven stoned in my past and I know how each affected me. Drinking makes you not give a damn about speed limits, in fact the faster you go the cooler it feels. Being stoned makes you concentrate to maintain the speed limit so you don't stand out and get pulled over. Hell, sometimes I think the roads would be safer if everyone was stoned during commutes, keep those tempers down.

 

[Siscokid]

Someone up in the command center is on some serious dope.

I agree with ya CAlIMann, they should fight the real problem, Drunk drivers! Or Too old to have a DL!