RESEARCHER STUDIES EFFECTS OF POT ON DRIVING

If you're reading this article while driving, you should drop the paper and
watch the road. If you're reading this while driving and smoking a joint,
you should pull over right away and read the whole thing.

Canada's on-again, off-again debate over our marijuana laws is on again,
thanks to federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan's recent off-the-cuff
musings about decriminalizing pot possession. By now, she's probably
wishing she'd kept her mouth shut.

"Let's just step back a bit here and be perfectly clear," said an agitated
McLellan at an Edmonton speaking engagement yesterday.

"The only thing we're saying is ... we're quite happy to have a Commons
committee discuss this subject with Canadians to get their views. I'm not
going to comment on this."

Which is just groovy with Peter Goldring, who's been having much fun lately
needling the justice minister on the pot issue.

Over the weekend, the Edmonton East MP suggested that the feds want to
decriminalize possession in order to tax marijuana to death, the way they
do tobacco.

Yesterday, he suggested that decriminalization could give a whole new spin
to the word "highway" and put Canadians at risk of death and injury at the
hands of stoned drivers.

"It's mind-altering and therefore dangerous under certain circumstances,"
he said. "It can make people paranoid and it can leave them disoriented."

Granted, smoking pot can make you disoriented. It makes you laugh
hysterically at things that probably aren't funny. But does it make you a
dangerous driver?

On its own, probably not. Dr. Alison Smiley is one of the few people on the
planet who've actually looked into pot use and driving habits. She's a
University of Toronto professor studying how humans interact with machines,
cars included.

She published a paper in 1999 that concluded, on the basis of medical
research and vehicle accident stats from the U.S. and Australia, that
marijuana may actually make you a more careful driver.

"The overall conclusion is that marijuana impairs driving performance, but
not in the way that alcohol does," she said. "Marijuana use, on its own,
tends to result in more cautious driving behaviour.

"The crash statistics showed no increase in accidents where marijuana was
involved."

The reason, Smiley suggests, is that marijuana impairs in a fashion quite
unlike booze. Drunk drivers tend to take stupid risks: speeding,
tailgating, dangerous passing, failing to signal or to wear a seat belt.

"Alcohol tends to make people more confident," she said. "The effect of
marijuana is a kind of information overload, too much stimulation. The
normal human reaction to that is to slow down, be extra careful. With
marijuana, the driving behaviour tends to be more compatible with the
impairment than with alcohol."

Since stoned drivers tend to drive slow, they're presumably easier to catch
than drunk drivers. They're also harder to convict. There's no practical
roadside test for marijuana impairment, and even blood and urine samples
aren't always reliable enough for the courts.

"Alcohol tends to distribute itself evenly throughout the body," said
Smiley. "So a blood or breath sample is a good indicator of how much
alcohol has reached the brain. Marijuana tends to collect in fatty tissues,
so a blood sample won't show exactly how much has reached the brain."

There's local precedent. In 1999, Albertan Patrick Houlgrave was acquitted
of impaired driving causing death in a Banff-area auto accident. Houlgrave
had smoked part of a joint with his then girlfriend about an hour before
the crash.

His lawyer brought a medical expert to court who testified the amount of
pot Houlgrave had consumed was too small to make him "impaired" under the law.

Of course, very few marijuana users are teetotallers; since grass tends to
be used in combination with booze, stoned drivers may also be driving drunk.

And marijuana and booze in combination have been proved to cause severe
impairment in driver reaction time.

But since it's tough to prove just how stoned someone is on marijuana, said
Smiley, cops should concentrate on the ones they can catch.

"It simply makes more sense to me to concentrate efforts on getting drunk
drivers off the streets."