In Northern California, It Is Advisable NOT to Drive After Ingesting Marijuana

With marijuana, if you smoked two or three days ago, under this new proposed law, you better not get behind the wheel. If you smoked a week ago, I wouldn’t advise getting behind the wheel. Even a month later, you are still at risk.

And that also applies to ingesting marijuana in other ways besides just smoking. If you ate edible marijuana, that’s a concern as well. And so, there is no chart. It’s just an “if you have it in your system” and that’s the scary thing about it. The other scary thing is for the prescription drugs. What they’re going after with the prescription drugs is the elderly.

There Is an Increasing Prosecutorial Focus on the Elderly Under the Impairment of Prescription Drugs

Look at the number of prescriptions that your parents or grandparents have versus what you have and usually, it’s ten times more. As you get older, you are prescribed many more prescription drugs and whether it’s something for pain, such as Vicodin or another type of drug, it’s going to be in your system and it will be used against you.

So, it’s scary there, as well, because they will go after the elderly. They will say that bad driving is because of the drugs when maybe someone should be reevaluated for whether they should be driving at all. You’ve got an 85-year-old driver that may be having some physical issues or maybe needs some driver’s training or maybe it’s that time to stop driving. That’s the determination that needs to be made and instead, they go after them for a DUI.

I can see that happening, and I have seen that happen. Essentially, it is just crazy. So if the laws are strict enough, what needs to happen is that the end result shouldn’t be people being convicted and fined and sent to jail.

The Content in Alcohol Abuse Education Classes Need to Be Updated to Increase the Effectiveness and Become a Better Deterrent 

What needs to happen is education. That’s where they need to focus. They need better education at DUI schools because the way that they are now set up is not working. I talk to my clients who have attended them, and they’re continuing to tell me that they’re hearing the same stuff over and over. Nothing new. Not a lot of education. The classes primarily consist of just kind of talking and they could be a lot more intense to be more effective.