High Driving – Is It Really That Bad?

If you do a quick Internet search on this topic, the answers are mixed. However, after doing some digging, it seems to be pretty clear.
Marijuana is known to decrease cognition, motor skills, and problem solving in users. So, why wouldn’t this be bad for driving?
Well, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there is “no significant increased crash risk attributable to cannabis after controlling for drivers’ age, gender, race, and presence of alcohol.”
So what does this mean? It means that after you remove factors like age, gender, race, and presence of alcohol, driving high has no link to crashing. But, my question is, how can you remove factors like age and presence of alcohol and still make that conclusion?
It is no secret that younger people are more likely to use marijuana, and that they are typically poorer drivers than older people. Additionally, using marijuana and alcohol together is not uncommon. So how can we say that driving high is okay when it has only been studied without regard to age or alcohol use, but it is not isolated from these factors in real life?
In addition to this information, drugabuse.gov states that, “studies have found a direct relationship between blood THC concentration and impaired driving ability.” So, even though the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found “no significant increased crash risk,” it does not mean that high driving is at all safe.
Finally, a Drug and Alcohol Independence Study showed that people with a blood-THC content of 13 micrograms/liter “had the same level of impairment as someone with a blood-alcohol content of 0.08%.” Additionally, “Smoking a joint typically raises a person’s THC levels to about 20 micrograms per liter.”

So, now we know that high driving is bad. What is law enforcement currently doing about it?
Enforcement is currently determined on a state-by-state basis. Some states have consequences for have any amount of THC or its metabolites in your system, while some have a threshold like 5 micrograms/liter.
They test impairment by using field sobriety tests, identical to what is used for alcohol sobriety. Additionally, they can do blood and urine tests to measure levels of THC or its metabolites in the driver.
These tests are a problem though, because blood and urine THC levels are unreliable. People who chronically use marijuana have constantly higher levels of THC in their system, and the metabolites can stick around for a really long time. This renders these means of measuring marijuana impairment to be inaccurate.
So what’s my point, after all of this? In light of recent legalizations of both medical and recreational marijuana, I think that this will become an increasingly important issue. This information makes me question: are we really eady to legalize this drug if we don’t have laws and accurate measurements in place for penalizing its misuse on the road?