Stimulants have been shown to decrease your risk of accidents multiple times. Cannabis on the other hand has been shown to impair you ability to react, pay attention to multiple tasks, your metacognition... There's a huge difference here.

If you drive frequently, maybe cannabis isn't a good idea for you to take to manage your anxiety, depression, or seizure control. If there's not a drug out there that helps you that does not make you a danger to others, then tough shit, you shouldn't be driving.

Driving is not a right, driving is not something everyone should be able to do. I think I would be a sub par driver, and so I don't drive. I pay more money to live in the city close to public transit. I don't say "it will probably be ok" and endanger other drivers, and this would be especially true if I actually needed pot to function.

> Driving is not a right, driving is not something everyone should be able to do. I think I would be a sub par driver, and so I don't drive. I pay more money to live in the city close to public transit. I don't say "it will probably be ok" and endanger other drivers, and this would be especially true if I actually needed pot to function.

While it is true that driving is not a right, this is an extremely narrow view. Especially in small municipalities (0-80000 people) transit is often poor and/or nonexistent, and downtown/commercial areas rarely have residences built or even nearby. Everyone relies on driving. In fact, the highschool I'm from offered free drivers ed, as a part of highschool.

Everyone has to drive and few people are sub-par drivers.

People drive impaired [alcohol, painkillers, anger, phones, passengers, weather, radio, stressors] all the time. That's not the point. The point is how much do we allow people to drive impaired. In the case of BAC, 0.05-0.08 is a common tolerance. This is not "zero," as people seem to think. Yep. You can have a beer (or two) and still be well within legal limits.

I'm not a libertarian by any means but we have very strict penalties already for people who kill others in vehicle accidents. I want to see INFORMED legislation not "i'm too scared to drive so nobody should ever do it unless they are of a perfectly clear mind and the road conditions are perfect."

Not everyone has the luxury of ordering an uber or hopping on a train for a few minutes to get home.

> If your lifestyle makes you a danger to others, then you need to change your lifestyle. If that implies moving to a large city, then that trumps your desire to remain in a small municipality.

Sorry—desire? Some people may chose to live in small municipalities, some don't chose. Some are forced to by their way of life (e.g. consider the people who grow your food).

I don't live in a small municipality. I'm merely pointing out the fact that your way of life is merely one way of living and is totally ignorant of the reality of many other people's experiences.

You're very rarely forced to do anything in life. My family has been in small farm agriculture for multiple generations.

Coincidentally they don't smoke pot and drive, because they're not inconsiderate, life endangering assholes.

My point still stands, that if you choose to take treatment that impairs your ability to drive, then you shouldn't drive. If driving is important to you, you should choose other treatment if you can. If you can't, then you shouldn't drive.

> You're very rarely forced to do anything in life. My family has been in small farm agriculture for multiple generations.

> Coincidentally they don't smoke pot and drive, because they're not inconsiderate, life endangering assholes.

Then there's a good chance that they consume liquor and get behind the wheel instead. I know a lot of farmers, and this is a pretty universal truism.

Nobody is forcing anyone to do anything but people generally don't feel compelled to uproot their lives/livelihood because someone far away is trying to tell them what's good for them. Because especially in farm communities, drinking and driving is most likely to cause endangerment to yourself, not others. Not much to hit on grid roads.

> You wouldn't say that a person with ADHD shouldn't drive on ADHD meds, but for anyone else, that would be effectively like driving on cocaine.

I thought it was pretty interesting actually, the big chart in the linked article suggests that stimulants actually lower the likelihood of an accident compared to a baseline.

I once had to drive myself few hundred kilometers back home after a discharge from a psych ward - i was taking some new variation of activisation pill intended to make me less apathetic. While usually I am super careful, will yield/brake preventively to avoid an accident (haven't had one yet - in big part thanks to mindfulness and survival instict) - in the begining that medicine just threw it out the window. I quite literally YOLO'd head on with an 18-wheeler because my brain just went OVERTAKE NOW, BITCH. (did not crash, it was just incredibly stupid and tight) Took me some time to adjust and stop being riddiculously reckless.

Same with nausea suppression pills for travel. I was once made to drive after taking one.

I'd venture to say that the lower likelyhood of an accident while on cocaine would come from most people that not pay any goddamn attention to anything, frantically scanning everything: the road, traffic, road shoulder, pedestrains, etc, etc

How did you "quite literally" have a crash that didn't happen?

I think emp_zealoth quite literally passed a vehicle while an oncoming semi was in the opposing lane. A "close call" if you will.

If you have never taken ADHD stimulants before then you might experience a little bit of euphoria the first few days of stimulant therapy, due to lack of tolerance, but I doubt it would be an impairment to driving.

Source: I've been taking methamphetamine (prescribed) for ADHD for quite some time. I experienced a little euphoria the first week when I initially started treatment on amphetamines but it was nothing even close to what I would consider impairment.