Drug driving hysteria will become our new Meth housing hysteria

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
14
12

The fear mongering over drug driving has begun…

Drugged driving fatalities outnumber drink driving deaths

Last year, 79 fatal crashes involved a driver with drugs in their system, compared with 70 involving an intoxicated driver.

In 2016, 59 fatal crashes involved a drugged driver and 67 involved alcohol. The figures come from testing that is done by authorities following a fatal crash.

“The AA has called drugged driving a silent killer on our roads for years and these latest figures confirm how prevalent drugs are in fatal crashes,” Dylan Thomsen, AA road safety spokesperson, said.

“No one wants someone who is high driving towards their family at 100km/h but right now the chances of being caught drugged driving is tiny. We have to change that.”

The association is repeating its call for the introduction of random roadside drugs testing.

…blah blah blah.

Here’s what’s happening. Cannabis can stay in the blood system far longer than its ability to impair you, so what we will get are a whole lot of drivers testing positive for cannabis, but no clear picture of how impaired those drivers are.

This is exactly what happened with the meth testing. People’s houses were testing positive for meth, but unless meth had been cooked there, there was no toxicity. The toxicity however didn’t matter because meth is illegal, so if you were smoking it, you deserved to be thrown out onto the street, banned from HNZ for 12 months, have your children removed and then getting stuck with all the bullshit contamination costs.

The exact same thing is going to happen with drug driving, we will get a whole bunch of drivers fail the tests because cannabis will turn up in their system and despite it NOT actually impairing their driving, they’ll still get charged because cannabis is currently illegal and our jails will fill.

NZ must be one of the few developed countries where spite and hate make up social policy, where $100m can be wasted for contamination fears that never existed and no one, absolutely no one, is held accountable.

Surely, it’s time for us to have an adult discussion about drug use and impairment rather than the usual bullshit brigade using unscientific reasoning to pass more laws?

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14 COMMENTS

  7. Despite the claims that society is going easier on cannabis use these days, in fact it is getting harder through work place drug testing and driving tests. It is going to get harder and harder for cannabis users to keep their job and not end up in prison

  8. I personally advocate driver competence testing when pulled over, regardless of intoxication. There are a number of simple cognitive and reaction tests that can be done in a few minutes to determine if a driver is capable of operating the vehicle safely. Makes sense, right? However this sort of common sense to road safety will likely never happen, because a lot of elderly people will fail this test…

  9. We have a drug driving law thanks to an outfit called Candor Trust which was run by a woman called Rachel Ford. Her mother was hit by a drug driver high on methadone and benzodiazepine. She was unable to get any traction with politicians until she included cannabis and then politicians were all over it creating policy.

    The problem here in New Zealand is alot of statistics have been created to support prohibition, many studies done with guidelines of what results are to be found, nobody is looking overseas at what statistics are proving.
    Take a look at this:
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-marijuana-traffic-death/after-states-legalized-medical-marijuana-traffic-deaths-fell-idUSKBN14H1LQ

  10. Interesting tendency to assume the recorded results were all pot cases. I’m more inclined to assume the number would comprise mostly meth, perhaps some opiates etc.
    Is their blanket term ‘drug’ willfully designed to have us infer specific substances, to work to their advantage for as long as it lasts, while the eventual reveal down the road of the actual stat breakdown, when vagueness has outlived its use, will likely be played out in a fashion that will reinvigorate whatever their agenda is at the time.
    I was much less cynical once, and I miss those days.

    • Part of the problem here is exactly that… there has been no distinction made between different drugs. This is deliberate. For all we know they could be refering to legal prescibed meds that just happen to make you unsafe to drive.
      The dog-whistle is that most conservative kiwis will assume its Cannabis and rally against the legalization issue and referendum.

  11. lets face it …there are huge vested interests against the use of cannabis being legalised for the people. (It has been a natural medicine for thousands of years)

    The opposition to cannabis and products comes from the multi billion dollar BIG PHARMA so-called pain-killing industry eg opioid based drugs and fentanyl for the elderly

    …and not a small part of the opposition to legalising cannabis comes from a corrupted medical profession ( in some cases in the pay of BIG PHARMA) which has a vested interest in the pain industry….after all who would not have an income out of patients in pain , if these patients and their families could grow their own and make their own pain relief ?

    …it is time we called BIG PHARMA and the medical profession out

    ( ….for their opposition to cannabis, which it would appear is based in corruption, greed, ignorance , authoritarianism and in some cases a power and control over life and death, sadism )

    https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/83570824/princes-death-drug-prescribed-to-new-zealands-elderly

    https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/americas-heroin-epidemic/billionaire-charged-bribing-doctors-prescribe-opioids-n814686

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXmyPsqkP44

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9KRdqwQcdo

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