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May 01, 2014

Pot Smokers in CA Won't Get DUIs for 2 Billionths of a Gram

SACRAMENTO—We've heard—and it's just a rumor, mind you—that one or two people in the adult industry smoke marijuana, possibly even on a regular basis. But with all the recent publicity over AB 1576, the forced barrier protection bill that for some reason is still alive, it was easy to fail to notice another onerous bill that would have made it a traffic violation to be driving with two nanograms of marijuana residue (aka THC) in one's bloodstream. And for those who don't know, a "nanogram" is one billionth of a gram—which is just about the same weight as the pixels forming the period at the end of this sentence. The bill was authored by Assemblymember Jim Frazier, whose 11th District is located about halfway between Sacramento and the Bay Area (and includes the Vacaville prison facility), and co-authored by state Sen. Lou Correa, who represents a big chunk of Orange County—and surprisingly, both are Democrats. Frazier's bill would have amended Sections 23152 and 23153 of the California Motor Vehicle Code to "make it unlawful for a person to drive a motor vehicle if his or her blood contains specified amounts of amphetamine, methamphetamine, cocaine or heroin or their metabolites, morphine, phencyclidine, or delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol [THC] of marijuana." Originally, the bill would have criminalized "any detectable amount" of those substances, but apparently that sort of open-ended ban wouldn't fly with Frazier's colleagues, so he attached a number to it: "2 nanograms, or more, per milliliter of blood." Think of it this way: A milliliter is one-thousandth of a liter; it doesn't even fill a teaspoon, and if that milliliter were of water, it would weigh one gram—but since it's blood, it weighs a little more: 1.06 grams. AB 2500 would have made it a violation to have two-billionths (0.000000002) of a gram of THC in a milliliter of a driver's blood. We're talking an amount that it would take an electron microscope to detect. By contrast, drivers drinking alcohol get to have eight hundredths (0.08) percent of that liquid in their blood before exceeding the legal limit—and to make the problem worse, alcohol is metabolized pretty quickly by the body, so that a person who's had a few drinks need only wait a few hours for the percentage to fall below the state maximum. By contrast, studies have shown that THC residue can stay in the blood for more than a week, and even the National Traffic Safety Administration admits that, "It is difficult to establish a relationship between a person's THC blood or plasma concentration and performance impairing effects." So congrats to the Assembly Committee on Public Safety for rejecting this onerous bill that would have fined and/or jailed thousands of pot smokers whose driving abilities were as sharp as any other driver's, but who had THC residue in their blood.

 
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