How does marijuana compare with alcohol?
In the short term, it’s a bad idea for people to combine the use of either with driving, or any activity where there’s the risk of accident or injury. But I should qualify that. It’s certainly true that in laboratory studies, THC, the active constituent of marijuana, impairs people’s ability to perform the same kinds of tasks associated with driving. But it’s also the case that when people are intoxicated with marijuana, they’re aware that they’re impaired and more likely to take steps to reduce the risk. Of course, the difficulty is that if something unanticipated happens, the person’s ability to respond to it is affected. The other point that needs to be made is that it’s unusual for people to only use marijuana. A more common pattern of use in our community is that people often use marijuana with alcohol. So I think the message we should be putting across about the risks of driving are the risks of driving when people use alcohol and marijuana together. In the long term, people who
