Plan B Forum

Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

I wish I did!

Unhappy 4/20

I lit up today (first time since October 2017) and the mellowness is a real trip, man.

At a recent family gathering, my brother in law mentioned one reason states should think long and hard before considering legalizing pot.

Many insurance companies are scared to death to insure manufacturing and processing businesses where those on the line may be legally stoned. His example was meat or poultry processing where SHARP power equipment is used.

I tend to think about aircraft production. Would you want to fly in a jetliner where the builders may have been high, legal or not?

Of course companies would have to set their own rules as to drug testing.

I had not considered the insurance angle, tending to have a live and let live/smoke attitude. I know several users, although I'm not one of them.

This is a real problem with the legalization of cannabis - which, BTW and up to a point, I am for. We have set limits, rather like speed limits, for alcohol which are relatively easy to police. Alcohol in blood or urine is pretty easy to test by gas chromatography and it's quite precise: so if your state has a 0.08% driving limit (e.g., Missouri which also has 0.02% if you are under 21) it's clear enough. It's like a speed limit in the sense that if you are over that number you can be presumed to be impaired and thus dangerous even if there is no accident.

There is no similar number for weed and the science is all over the place. THC is widely and probably wrongly understood to be the component of weed which makes you stoned; but the metabolism to other similar molecules is unclear as is the relationship between THC in the blood and in the brain. THC hangs around in the blood for perhaps a month after you smoke so clearly it is not the only component which makes you high. And of course if you have been smoking with a beer it may be more than additive. It's a while since I looked at this but a quick DuckDuckGo search hasn't found me a reliable roadside blow-into-this-bag test; and besides if you have ingested weed brownies it probably won't show up in your breath.

The opioid crisis is really bad because far too many in the workforce are hooked on these drugs. Many of these employees are functional and hold jobs in the positions mentioned above. I don't see where a pot user could be any worse off than the alcoholic or the hydrocodone abuser sitting or standing next to them -- maybe even less so.

It's all a matter of perception depending on how any given individual rates and/or categorizes drugs and drug (ab)use. It's up to the employer to be vigilant and weed out potential threats to the public. But they rarely act until there's a problem. And that business model has been status quo almost forever.