Impairment tests are becoming big business
“Walk a straight line” isn’t going to cut it anymore as police and employers grapple with growing use of marijuana.
Earlier this month, a study in a peer-reviewed journal became the latest sign that there’s a paradigm shift going on in the nascent business of detecting impairment levels. The article, which appeared in Neuropsychopharmacology, showed that an imaging technique can detect cannabis impairment with 76% accuracy. That’s better than the 68% accuracy of field tests that employ traditional law enforcement protocols such as walking a straight line and examining a subject’s pupils.
The technique, called functional near-infrared spectroscopy, measures changes in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. It shows that impaired brains look different than non-impaired brains in a way that doesn’t necessarily correlate with the amount of THC in a person’s system. THC detection in saliva or on the breath has so far been the main focus of tests. The study was carried out on 169 people at Massachusetts General Hospital, which is part of Harvard Medical School.
The study is a big deal for the cannabis industry, since the lack of a clear test to gauge intoxication has become a stumbling block for federal legalization. Though links between marijuana and accidents have been hard to draw due to factors such as the frequent mixing of alcohol with drugs, the study estimates that THC, which is the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, at least doubles the risk of fatal motor vehicle crashes. [Read More @ Bloomberg]
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