Nowadays there are a ton of different options to determine if you’re too drunk to get behind the wheel, but about if you’ve smoked too much.
It can be dangerous to drive stoned. Now that more and more states are legalizing recreational marijuana, they’re also having to come up with ways to test whether or not a driver might not be sober enough to be on the streets.
In Oregon, that comes in the form of a field sobriety test. You know, the thing you always see in the movies where you have to walk a straight line and put your finger on your nose. It’s meant to judge your reaction time. If you fail, then you might have to do a urine test, which can produce positive results and earn you a DUI if you’ve consumed any cannabis in the past few weeks, not hours.
It’s a flawed system for sure. A system one college professor saw as an opportunity to create something better. Enter DRUID. It’s a .$.99 Android app that judges your reaction time in a series of tests that take either two or five minutes, afterward you’re given the app’s recommendation on whether or not you’re ok to drive.For starters, if you think there’s a chance you’re not ok to drive, then you should just not drive.
However, if you smoked a few hours ago, think you’re great, and just want to triple check before heading out, then it can be a decent place to get started.
I downloaded it and tried it out totally sober, and (miraculously) received a score saying I was, in fact, ok to drive. Tests include following simple directions like following a circle on the screen with your finger while counting the number of squares that appear and tapping different points on the screen when prompted. It’s nothing too difficult, but even sober I found some of the tasks challenging.
The app also uses some caveman font that isn’t my favorite and kind of looks like something a stoner might make, but I digress.
That said, stoned I think it would actually come in handy. Weed slows you down, sometimes to a point (for me at least) that I don’t realize how compromised my reaction time is. This was definitely a challenge sober to focus and follow directions. Stoned, I think I would be able to immediately realize that I shouldn’t get off the couch after trying just one of these tasks, I wouldn’t need to get all the way through and have the app tell me to stay put.
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