Puff, puff pass on driving while drunk and stoned.
Here at Back Page HQ, this humble scribe has always been surprised at the sheer number of people who admit to texting while driving.
Having found these admissions alarming, we were even more concerned to learn that the United States has noted an increased risk of motor accidents where the driver has simultaneously ingested cannabis and alcohol.
To explore this effect farther, the boffins at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine behavioural pharmacology research unit fed consenting adults weed brownies and alcohol before plopping them into a driving simulator and letting them go ham.
The mean age of the 25 study participants was 26, and all of them reported weekly or bi-weekly cannabis and alcohol consumption.
Some received a placebo brownie, while others received a brownie containing cannabis. Some also received a placebo drink, while others received alcohol.
The researchers also collected baseline driving scores while all participants were sober.
Drivers who received placebo alcohol and brownies were the safest drivers, followed by the drivers who ate 10mg THC brownies and drank placebo alcohol.
The two worst groups of drivers were those who had eaten a 10mg THC brownie and had a 0.05% breath alcohol concentration and those who had eaten a 25mg THC brownie and had a 0.05% breath alcohol concentration.
“In this crossover trial of healthy adult cannabis and alcohol co-users, co-ingestion of cannabis edibles containing 10 mg and 25 mg of THC (common doses on the retail market) with alcohol at a BrAC [breath alcohol concentration] of 0.05% (equivalent of 2 to 3 standard drinks within approximately 1 to 2 hours) produced greater driving impairment and subjective intoxication than the same doses of these substances alone and comparable, or higher, impairment than alcohol alone at 0.08% BrAC (the per se limit in most of the US),” the researchers wrote in JAMA Network Open.
“Furthermore, cannabis, when administered alone, produced dose-orderly impairment of driving performance, with 25 mg THC eliciting similar driving impairment to 0.08% BrAC.
“However, cannabis alone and cannabis with the lower dose of alcohol did not reliably impact performance on behavioral tests (ie, SFSTs), commonly used by law enforcement to detect impaired drivers.”
In other words, beware the cross-faded driver.
Email your safe driving tips to Holly@medicalrepublic.com.au.
