5 Lies About Marijuana That Won't Die Easy

It’s true that most people are worse drivers high than sober. It’s also true that very regular smokers tend to show little cognitive deficit on the road, as was demonstrated in Sanjay Gupta’s Weed documentary. Hall’s study found that high drivers were twice as likely to get into an accident than their sober counterparts. There are two major issues with this finding, one of context, and the other of presentation. The conclusion steps over a host of contextual factors, namely how high the driver is and his or her tolerance. The other issue is in how this data is presented: a twofold increase in the likelihood of an accident isn’t especially large when the odds for most people to get into a car crash are quite low. In 2012, Americans got in 1.13 fatal car crashes per 100 million miles driven (this number has drunk drivers baked in, removing them should drop the figure below 1 death per 100 million miles). The average driver can double that rate and still consider herself quite safe. Stoned driving should be discouraged, but there is no sense in thinking of it as a major public health issue.

It’s 2014, and we’re still hearing about the gateway effect. People who use hard drugs are very likely to have tried cannabis first, but the suggestion that smoking pot causes hard drug use falls to the first lesson of any statistics class: correlation is not causality. Pot, being the most popular and available illicit drug, tends to be the one that people try first. Furthermore, gateway theory advocates consistently omit alcohol from their calculations, as if there could be no connection between legal and illegal drugs. Virtually everyone who has tried any recreational drug, marijuana included, has had a drink at some point in their life. Many of them have had a cigarette or two as well. So why is the gateway label never attached to alcohol? Because the people still making noise about the gateway theory have an agenda, and they are willing to ignore logic to push it.