What really happens when you drive under the influence of cannabis? REV puts it to the test in a professional driving simulator with police-style impairment tests — walking the line, eye tracking and cognitive tasks.
03:57and as you can tell I haven't done this in a long time
04:02and it's not getting better
04:05I can feel the weed doing the work
04:07and I have no idea how that's gonna look in the simulator
04:10to be honest
04:11this dizziness or high feeling comes from the THC in marihuana
04:17from my joint smoke it went into my lungs
04:20and there it got passed into my blood
04:22and that carried it into my brain
04:25now having reached my brain
04:28the THC in simple terms is overly activating parts of my brain
04:33and this creates all the effects people know
04:36altered senses, impaired memory, dizziness, low reaction time
04:42so let's see which of those I'll experience
04:46before I do anything I need water and chill a little
04:53first up are the colors
04:56white
04:57green
04:58black
04:59yellow
05:00jesus
05:02okay
05:03red
05:04green
05:05red
05:06blue
05:07yellow
05:08and
05:09oh wow
05:1015 seconds more
05:11onto memory
05:13and the police tests
05:16and after a big sip of water
05:19it's time for me to go behind the wheel
05:21for the country's right drive
05:23where I need to go in a straight line
05:26yeah
05:28it's actually a lot harder to tell if you are actually driving straight
05:43okay first test done
05:44but yeah it's really hard to actually follow the road even though you are just driving in a straight line
05:54I'm a bit afraid of the city test drive now but no matter where I would drive it would probably be illegal anywhere in the world
06:03in recent years cannabis has become legal in more and more countries across the globe and with that also different regulations on driving under the influence
06:13usually the level of THC is measured as we're doing it here by concentration in the blood
06:20and maximum concentrations are measured in nanogram per milliliter of blood
06:24many European countries often range between 1 and 2 nanograms per milliliter of blood
06:30frontrunners are actually Germany with 3.5 and the Netherlands with 3 nanograms per milliliter
06:37internationally some states in the US like Colorado, Washington or Montana even allow 5 nanograms per milliliter
06:45which one of these is best suited to work?
06:50the pharmacokinetics of cannabis or tetrahydrocannabinol is quite complicated
06:57we have a quite unstable relationship between the dose
07:02so what is in your joint and what you inhale
07:05and between the effect on the other side
07:08so the effect is highly individually
07:11in other words it's really hard to set up a threshold that works for everyone
07:15a common threshold that is only based on THC is extremely hard to establish
07:22because there are so many different influence factors that mainly depend on the individual
07:29that's why some states and countries add impairment based laws to this
07:34so if it's visible that you cannot walk in a straight line anymore
07:38or if you cannot touch your nose with your finger
07:41you're too high to drive
07:48which brings us back to my second test drive in the city
07:57yeah you can really feel that your reaction time is a lot slower
08:01oh my god yeah I just ran over a kid
08:03oops
08:04fuck
08:10at least didn't run over two pedestrians
08:13well
08:18yeah it's not a good day for pedestrians today I'm afraid
08:21because now I just focus on like one thing
08:24and it's really hard to concentrate on anything else
08:27so you miss a lot of stuff
08:29that's just
08:31and that can be deadly for other people
08:33who are walking around here
08:41and this focus problem was also visible in the control room
08:45yeah so that's typical for cannabis
08:47so your thinking is way slower
08:49so you have much more problems to recognize some things
08:54so we also could see it in your driving like you
08:58your speeding was way way slower than before
09:02especially in the curves
09:04but despite the feeling
09:05the blood results will turn out entirely different than we expected
09:09originally I planned to smoke even more weed
09:11and also mix it with alcohol
09:13to show you the worst of the worst
09:15but obviously my circulatory system is a bit sensitive
09:19so now we're just going to wait for the results from the blood test
09:24a couple of weeks later the results came back from the lab
09:26but to all of our surprise
09:28there were no traceable amounts of THC in my bloodstream
09:32also none of the other typical byproducts from smoking weed
09:37okay that's certainly a surprise because I felt intoxicated to some level
09:42what could be an explanation for this test result
09:45one explanation would be that the cannabis you smoked
09:49was not the highest potency cannabis that is available in Germany
09:54another explanation might be that you did not inhale the smoke as deeply as an experienced smoker would have inhaled
10:04also to my surprise the phase that we tested
10:07so driving right after you smoked weed
10:09isn't the most dangerous one Benno Hartung tells me
10:13so we see most accidents in the so-called post-acute phase
10:18so people feel sober
10:20maybe 3, 4, 5 hours after smoking cannabis
10:24but they are still influenced
10:26and this is the period where the severe accidents happen
10:33okay the experiment didn't go 100% as planned
10:36but that's the nature of experiments
10:38what anybody can take away
10:40is that it's really hard to guess when you smoke weed
10:43how much THC will end up in your blood
10:46and how long it's going to stay in your system
10:49for me it was so hard to focus on multiple things
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