> It would give better context to a dead drivers testing positive for THC.
No it wouldn't.
People make those excuses because it's weed, but you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol.
> It would give better context to a dead drivers testing positive for THC.
No it wouldn't.
People make those excuses because it's weed, but you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol.
No need to be judgmental about statistics. They are just facts.
A similar result about alcohol would be the (hypothetical) statement that the rate of drunk drivers in fatal accidents was constant before and after the enactment of Prohibition.
I do agree that the fact that fatal THC% stays constant before and after legalization is a surprise.
It absolutely would. If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect. I find it unlikely 40% of people test positive for THC, but yes, it does matter.
That wouldn't actually mean no effect, you need 40% of people driving to test positive for it to be no effect. It's unlikely the population driving is equivalent to the population at large - for one there's a set of responsible people who won't drive while high. For another weed use isn't randomly distributed through the population but correlated with certain subsets, which probably have a non-average rate of driving just by coincidence.
(Not that it really matters since I don't buy for a second that anywhere near 40% of people/people-driving are high at any given time. I also don't put much faith in numbers in the abstract of a a yet-to-be-published study...)
There is a case for the two populations to be quite similar.
THC in the blood doesn’t mean actively high for habitual users, which would be most users if THC consumption is high. It means recent use, but not clear impairment.
> If 40% of people test positive for THC, then this would mean there is no effect
Can you explain what you mean by this?
The article is not saying 40% of all drivers tested positive, it’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
> It’s stating that 40% of people who died in a car accident tested positive, at pretty high levels too.
It doesn't say anything about the distribution, only that the "average" (presumably, the arithmetic mean, a measure particularly sensitive to distortion by outliers) was at a particularly high level.
The levels described are actually pretty low. The "legal limit" is so low for THC that anyone who's had THC in the previous days could test positive, even if they aren't "high" at the time of driving. It isn't quite the same as the BAC legal limits for alcohol. And it doesn't account for body weight, tolerance, and other factors that definitely contribute to how a driver reacts no matter how long it's been since they consumed THC.
And the study doesn't seem to differentiate between the different types of THC either, some of which are not psychoactive at all and which people use to relieve pain and anxiety. There's quite a lot of people using non-psychoactive THC which wouldn't impair driving.
Yes, it would be useful. When controlling for variables, you normally want to compare against a baseline.
If 40% of the whole population has THC in them, we'd need a control population (maybe from earlier when thc was less prominent) to see if per capita deaths has meaningfully increased. I'd do the same study, tangentially, for tech workers to see if productivity has changed when controlling for other variables.
No it wouldn't.
That would be true if you looked at a variable which is not influenced by driving, like the percentage that wear red jumpers, but one would hope that not everyone is reckless enough to be highly intoxicated and drive.
This is again THC apologizism, nobody would even begin to suggest this if we were talking about alcohol.
> nobody would even begin to suggest this if we were talking about alcohol.
When we talk about alcohol, we explicitly separate presence from impairment using blood alcohol concentration. We set legal thresholds because studies show a sharp increase in crash risk above those levels, relative to sober drivers. If alcohol were evaluated by merely asking "was alcohol present?" we would massively overestimate its causal role the same way THC is being overestimated here.
The problem with THC data is not that baseline comparisons are illegitimate; it's that we lack an agreed-upon, time-linked impairment metric comparable to BAC. THC metabolites persist long after intoxication, so presence alone is a weak proxy for risk.
So applying baseline controls to THC is not "apologism", it's applying the same evidentiary standards we already demand for alcohol, so the opposite of what you said.
> This is again THC apologizism, nobody would even begin to suggest this if we were talking about alcohol.
This is literally how safe legal limits were derived.
Wasn't so much looking for an excuse, so much as more information.
Why did you automatically assume the point of bias?
> you would have never posted that on an article about alcohol
Well of course not, as the two drugs have completely different intoxication side effects.