Launch HN: SannTek (YC S19) – Breathalyzer for Cannabis
I bet some of you have had the same idea cross your mind that we had: "If we have a breathalyzer for alcohol, why don't we have a breathalyzer for cannabis?" We're nanotechnology engineering alumni from the University of Waterloo. Two factors led into us deciding to pursue this idea: 1. Cannabis was being legalized across Canada and police were completely ill-prepared, so we saw an opportunity to help; 2. the science required to make this device exist was particularly interesting.
Alcohol breathalyzers are fundamentally a fuel cell where the alcohol in your breath sample is oxidized, which then produces an electrical current that the device then translates to BAC. For alcohol, this works because of Henry's Law, which says that at any given temperature the ratio between the concentration of alcohol in the blood and that in the alveolar air in the lungs is constant.
Cannabis is a very different beast. Not only is it a non-volatile, fat-soluble molecule, but the mechanism in which THC (the psychoactive component of cannabis) appears in your breath isn't super straight forward. Also, it is present in much lower concentrations in the breath compared to alcohol. Whereas a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% (the legal limit in most states) might result in a concentration of 208 ppm of ethanol in the breath, a similarly impairing dose of cannabis results in 0.00001 ppm of the drug in breath.
Detecting such a low concentration is difficult, and as a result, cannabis drug use has been detected in a variety of sub-optimal ways. The state of the art is a blood draw, followed by detection of THC at a toxicology laboratory using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. While accurate and well-validated, this approach has several problems. First of all, since THC is fat-soluble it remains in a person's body much longer than alcohol, especially if that person is a frequent user. Frequent users have been known to have detectable THC in their blood one week after beginning abstinence. These people are clearly not impaired all week but could be arrested and charged with a DUI based on many states laws across the US. Interestingly, police have the opposite problem with infrequent users. For most people, the concentration of THC in their system will decay quickly post-consumption. It takes around 2 hours (at best) for a police officer to get a blood draw from a suspect. At this point, many people will no longer have detectable THC in their system. Our device solves both these problems for police. Our breathalyzer uses an ultra-sensitive immunosensor to detect the minute concentration of THC in breath. Breath is the better medium for cannabis testing for several reasons. First of all, THC concentration in breath for both frequent users and infrequent users decays below detectable levels within 3-4 hours post-consumption and we have never detected THC in the baseline for any of our subjects. So our device does not incorrectly identify frequent users as impaired as blood testing can. Secondly, the breath tests can be administered quickly roadside, eliminating the risk of concentration decay seen with blood draws.
Our device comes with a reusable analyzer and a single-use disposable cartridge. It costs us $2 to make a cartridge, and police are willing to pay $20 per test. An individual will breathe into the mouthpiece, and our filter system will collect exhaled breath particles (specifically non-VOCs). Currently, we manually "extract" the THC off of the filter into a solvent liquid, but in the future, this will be automated using novel microfluidics. The solvent, with the captured THC, is then transferred to the surface of the sensor- which is an electrochemical immunoassay. When the THC is there, the output signal is different than when the THC is not there (happy to dive further into th...
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 317 ms ] threadBut also, I have mixed feelings about this from a moral/ethics perspective. I think it's going to do more harm than good by making testing easier and more prevalent (we already have blood tests for cases where someone was injured by a driver, etc.). The good thing is it may save some regular users from being labeled as impaired versus a blood test. Outside of that small case it all seems bad for society to me..
You'll note that most people angrily report their bad incidents with cops; when they're doing their job it goes unremarked. Not too far off from good IT support.
Sounds like a terrible world honestly.
In general my opinion is that .08 BAC sounds reasonable and an equivalent of MJ "could" be also. But most cases that would be a huge amount of MJ, and still doesn't relate to the effects noticed at high consumption of alcohol. IE I have never seen someone smoke so much they black out and cannot control themselves. Whereas that's happening every night people go out drinking.
My view is that there is no good way to measure this universally among all people, and MJ "impaired" driving is a non-issue compared with Drunk Driving.
Should we test people for driving on caffeiene? What about after eating too much and being sleepy? These are effects on par and just judgement calls people need to make. If the officer can smell weed\finds it then that seems appropriate and enough.
EDIT: To the points below about people passing out or cops calling 911 on themselves that speaks to the incredible variety of experience people have and what someone might experience their first time with edibles. It's not comparable to the effects smoking has on regular users, and not something anyone should be doing while driving, but how do you test for that with a Breathalyzer?
Fair points but I think this testing is only about smoking? That would seem to give even less reason to support this kind of testing since it misses the most egregious cases of edibles. I think anyone would agree that people in that kind of state are in no condition to drive, but again in my experience way outside of normal usage and not something I have ever seen. If the test took that into account alright, but it seems like these breathalyzer would be detecting a far lower threshold
Double Edit: "Theyre working on it" when it comes to edibles....
It definitely is not anywhere near as bad as other drugs impairment wise, but it definitely can be quite dangerous to drive on.
And yes, being sleepy while driving is also super dangerous.
Every now and then you also hear that a law enforcement officer got high and called 911 panicking, googling "cop calls 911 high" brings up a couple of Canadian officers and a Michigan officer on the first page.
facepalm
If you can let that sort of judgement slip, you think there aren't people out there getting baked and going for a drive, or now that you can easily vape away just driving down the street vaping?
A friend recently passed away and after the funeral a bunch of us went back to the house they grew up in to just hang out and talk about old times. Just about everyone there was getting extremely high, forgetting what they were saying mid sentence, taking the better part of a half hour to scratch off a single scratch off ticket, having the goofy slouch where your head goes way out in front of you... and then leaving, in their vehicles still quite high.
I mean, if you can't have a conversation without completely forgetting what you were saying in the middle of a word... you can't tell me that isn't going to affect your driving. You might just sit at a stop sign for 5 minutes because you forgot it was your turn to go, but you also might be like "hey I'm gonna check Facebook" while you're driving down the interstate.
If I had to choose, I'd rather be on the road with drunk drivers than high drivers. People that are drunk often have slowed reaction time, people that are high can easily entirely forget what they are doing and start doing something else.
To the points about people passing out or cops calling 911 on themselves that speaks to the incredible variety of experience people have and what someone might experience their first time with edibles. It's not comparable to the effects smoking has on regular users, and not something anyone should be doing while driving, but how do you test for that with a Breathalyzer?
Fair points but I think this testing is only about smoking? That would seem to give even less reason to support this kind of testing since it misses the most egregious cases of edibles. I think anyone would agree that people in that kind of state are in no condition to drive, but again in my experience way outside of normal usage and not something I have ever seen. If the test took that into account alright, but it seems like these breathalyzer would be detecting a far lower threshold
Edit: "Theyre working on it" when it comes to edibles....
The problem is that you can't really test for these tolerances, especially not in the field. That's why it's usually better to air on the side of caution and set a limit.
If this was really about reducing risk on the road, we should somehow incentivize people like OP to work on the self-driving car problem, rather than come up with a device to catch stoned drivers. Think how much brain power and law enforcement time is going to be taken up dealing with stoned drivers. The rational thing to do would be to let people drive stoned, arrest those who are visibly impaired and can't perform a field sobriety test, and focus our efforts on getting AI to replace all human drivers.
Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant that that, in high doses, causes an extreme degredation to motor skills, coordination, and thought patterns and can cause a loss of conciousness.
I agree there should be safety regulations in regards to weed but, breathalyzers and typical drug and alcohol tests are not an effective way to gauge the level of cannabis intoxication for an indiviual.
Few people would be in favor of taking away alcohol breathalyzers from law enforcement, and rightly so. Giving the police access to cannabis breathalyzers is no different. Once they are in every police car in the world, few people would want to take those away too. This world can't come soon enough, IMO.
It’s obvious that the police will want a device that produces more convictions, no point in disputing that.
I’m wondering if you can elaborate on what incentives your company has to produce accurate devices, against your customer’s unstated preferences. What’s keeping you in check? Are you worried about class action lawsuits from victims of false positives, if it were independently proven that your device is overly sensitive?
Is that obvious? If this were as overwhelming an incentive as you say, we wouldn't have accurate breathalyzers for alcohol. But we do, and it's simple to see why. 1) Cops aren't the only customers; medical establishments, individuals, and workplaces also have a legitimate interest in measuring impairment. 2) Tech like this doesn't remain novel forever, it can be checked for accuracy, and if you made a device that exaggerated impairment your reputation would tank, your company name would become a political hot potato, and your sales would never materialize. 3) There is definitely a point in disputing the idea that cops are indiscriminate gangsters roaming the streets trying to lock up any citizen they don't like the look of. Police have their personal and institutional biases, but by and large, most are interested in tools that allow them to safely and fairly administrate the rule of law. Police don't have much career or institutional incentive to arrest someone for a DUI at a traffic stop or not—they just stop bad drivers and check. It's prosecutors who are trying to rack up conviction numbers as a matter of career advancement and political viability. But even that gets checked: their work will be subject to an adversarial legal system, at which point any evidence that the device doesn't work would come out in court and tank their conviction rate.
So... where do you see perverse incentives here, again?
No idea how rampant this is, every system will have flaws. But I question whether we can use the alcohol breathalyzer example without acknowledging there are significant unanswered questions w/r/t accuracy.
This doesn't prove my point, but manufacturers do aggressively fight against researchers identifying flaws in their products. Given the high stakes (+ the fact this isn't a security issue, really), it seems like a major smell to me.
There are reports out there of people convicted, who are blocked from examining the devices used as the primary piece of evidence against them.
Also, after years of effort to discredit breathalyzer results, convictions ARE being overturned regularly.
NJ overturns > 27k convictions because of breathalyzer issues - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/nyregion/nj-dwi-convictio...
MS judge suspends admission of breathalyzer evidence -- https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/01/10/breathalyzers-tempor...
More relevant info - https://www.zdnet.com/article/draeger-breathalyzer-breath-te...
I would avoid incarceration of anyone from a test like this without significant and clear data that there is an actual problem we need to resolve. There are plenty of well proven driving problems we could focus on correcting.
[0] https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.dot.gov/files/documents/81...
It's going to be fairly easy to test this. You take one group of people who haven't smoked in the last few hours and you test them. Make sure it doesn't go off. You take another group who have smoked (I'm sure plenty of college students would be happy to sign up for this trial) and you test them, make sure it does go off. It's pretty simple. It's a machine with an empirical number, so you don't even have to do this double blind.
And if it doesn't give good results? It won't hold up in court. Every lawyer defending someone with a positive result (whether false positive or true positive) will argue that the device isn't accurate and the case gets tossed (or even the ability to use these as evidence). If it doesn't hold up in court, police really won't have much incentive to use these anyway.
But even that is too simplist. You need to activity give a specific dose to a group with similiar profiles. You need to test with different profile groups.
Remember we are testing currently high not has been high.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/draeger-breathalyzer-breath-te...
There are times when it is necessary. The drunk driver who plowed into a family of 4 and killed them all? Fuck yeah I'm getting his blood - he needs to go to prison.
My understanding is that GA pilots are not allowed to fly within 8 hours of consuming any alcohol (my understanding is that most commercial outfits have more stringent limits) - I personally think this makes a lot of sense for operating a motor vehicle, too.
As a starting point I think you will agree that someone who has a BAC of zero ought to be able to drive.
The majority of drunk driving accidents are the result of people that are plowed. More disturbing by far those who ARE caught and jailed have driven hundreds of thousands of miles drunk as a skunk before actually getting taken off the road.
As BAC decreases accident rates decline towards normalcy at around 0.06 its difficult to distinguish the accident rate of those who have consumed and those who have not.
People at that point neither walk nor drive funny and are very unlikely to be discovered unless you stop and test everyone or you happen to be black or Hispanic.
Instead of tightening already reasonable standards to ridiculous levels we would save vastly more lives by actually enforcing the laws we have effectively.
Not if they are tired or hungover. I mean, I don't think people should drive when they are tired for other reasons, either. It's a dangerous thing, and something you should only do when you are at your best.
Alcohol is just an easy target (and an important target) because it both degrades your actual ability, while at the same time, increasing your opinion of your ability. Because of that second effect, it's especially difficult to tell when you have had too much to drive... because one of the common side effects of alcohol is an increase in confidence.
It should be difficult to drive, and it should be easy to lose the ability to drive.
>Instead of tightening already reasonable standards to ridiculous levels we would save vastly more lives by actually enforcing the laws we have effectively.
eh, we already have rules against driving tired. they just lack an objective test.
I think that if you think you can operate a motor vehicle or a gun in public at 0.06, you are not being nearly careful enough. (And I suspect the additional confidence that alcohol gives you might actually contribute much to accident rates. I know I certainly feel more confident one drink in, and confidence is deadly when you are operating weapons or heavy machinery around other people.)
It's a confirmation, and when you're about to sentence someone on the spot with what is often a life changing, multi year disqualification from driving, the courts require the police to be absolutely sure.
If a defendant ever challenges the use of the device, an inaccurate (particularly, false-positive-producing) device is more likely to be thrown out discrediting the device class, not just the individual case, and potentially forcing after-the-fact dismissal of prior convictions.
So, avoidable false-positives isn't necessarily an approach consistent with maximizing convictions.
After-the-fact dismissal of convictions may seem like things eventually work out, but remember that in the meantime innocent people's lives are upended as they're thrown into the justice system.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20718599
No, it doesn't.
But, if the police motivation is maximizing convictions that stick, it's a potentiality that reduces the degree to which a system that produces false positives meets that goal. (Unless you have a system that is as comprehensive a conspiracy as the FBI crime lab wholesale fabrication of the entire field of fiber analysis where essentially all the “experts” in the field were part of the scam...and even that eventually collapsed.)
It doesn't even have to be a big conspiracy theory. Here is an instance of a breathalyzer manufacturer pressuring researchers to stop researching whether their devices are faulty [1]. Are they actually delivering false positives? Who knows! We need to bake oversight and accountability in from the jump, not try to back our way in once too many people's lives are disrupted.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/draeger-breathalyzer-breath-te...
Yeah, I’m not disagreeing with that, nor does it seem to disagree with my point, that the consequences of the nearly-inevitable collapse makes it dubious that maximizing positive results by encouraging false positives is actually a means to the proposed police goal of maximizing convictions, if by that one means convictions that stick.
I never suggested, and also explicitly rejected, the idea that this even superficially results in a no-harm situation.
I'm also skeptical that it provides sufficient motivation to spend the money to bring the false positive rate down to X acceptable level. This is a for-profit company; they're going to try to get the lowest ratio of R&D spend to revenue that they can.
In general, the police are hyper vigilant about buying only devices that are independently validated to be very accurate. Every conversation we have had has eventually lead to "is it NHTSA approved?". The reason for this need for third party validation is that the police are incredibly court room sensitive. If there is any chance a defense attorney would be able to pull out a study showing low specificity or sensitivity for a device, the police will simply not buy it. Third party validation gives them that guarantee.
You are right that the police want more convictions (or less time consuming convictions), but the way they do that is by having very accurate devices that are defensible in court, not inaccurate devices that risk cases being thrown out. That is why making sure our device has low false positive is very important.
My point is, a lot of state governments (at least in the US) spend money first and verify later, and 'verify' can be a damnably loose term. Loose enough to violate WAC 448-15-020 (in Washington state's case) which requires a 'reasonable degree of scientific accuracy'.
EDIT: Apparently the original link (below) is no longer available in WSP's records, which is interesting. You can view the document via archive.org, here
https://web.archive.org/web/20170211114622/http://www.wsp.wa...
original (defunct) http://www.wsp.wa.gov/breathtest/docs/webdms/Draeger/Valid_D...
There is some stuff we can do, however. For instance, we can directly build the QC schedule into the device so it does not work unless you get it calibrated. We can also have QC cartridges that have a barcode that the device reads to make sure you actually ran a calibration check properly and the device passed.
We were so focused on internal methods for making the device accurate, but maybe we should put some thought into how we can make sure the police use it properly.
This times a million. Do not just make the device accurate, make sure it is very hard for a motivated individual to trick it into being inaccurate, in either direction. Please excuse the terminology, was learned from very elderly engineers, but above foolproof (stupidity), there is twatproof (deliberate misuse) and cuntproof (educated malice). Fully cuntproofing is very hard, but any device like this should be at least fully twatproofed, with at least some attempt at cuntproofing.
One thing I will say is that the prefixes I gave are in general use as descriptive epithets by both men and women across much of the English speaking world, along with many others decribing the male genitalia, with much greater frequency than you will find on here. Personally, I'm with Alice Fraser on this one - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gioul9PW9B0 - but will cheerfully adapt the taxonomy in future, if I can find better words to use for the prefixes. Any ideas?
I'm not convinced it breaks down into three clean categories anyway.
I disagree. In the taxonomy of these things, being a twat is more impulsive misbehaviour, while being a cunt involves malicious aforethought and intent. There is a fairly clear meaning from that general usage.
>I'm not convinced it breaks down into three clean categories anyway.
I agree, but I didn't make it up and people tend to use the rule of three for stuff like this. I suppose a category of dickproof could be added between foolproof and twatproof, but I think it already has a lot of overlap with foolproof.
Firstly, twatproof, from reply #14 in the Festool owner's group to a question about dovetails:
>"I just had a go with the Festool jig and it's the most twatproof solution I've ever seen."
https://www.festoolownersgroup.com/hand-tools/advice-sought-...
and secondly, cuntproof, on twitter, with someone called Wiryjack describing the term to the award winning writer and naturalist Helen Macdonald:
>"A mechanic I used to know described things as 'cuntproof', which I took to mean foolproof but extra robust to deter the malicious as well as the stupid."
https://twitter.com/Wiryjack/status/938755264815271938
I may note that Helen Macdonald apparently considers cuntproof to be an excellent term, well worth adding to her vocabulary.
FWIW, as a native English speaker I also found your post both needlessly offensive and equally inscrutable.
Bless your heart.
How do you reconcile that with the reality of the NIK tests which are notoriously unreliable and ubiquitous among police departments?
We have actually been talking to a lot of TPAs (the organizations that do drug testing for industry). We have some interest, but unfortunately a lot of employers still have a stigma against cannabis. They are happy failing people for using the drug on the weekend because they really don't want drug users working for them. Hopefully this gets challenged in court soon, but until then we will need to do some educating.
With that being said, we're also allocating a significant amount of our resources to have full-time employees, with lived experiences, research the implications of our technology on minority communities.
If they are driving impaired, then the solution to the injustice is not to let them go, but to arrest more impaired white drivers.
If they are not driving impaired, but being arrested based on the subjective opinions of the police officer, then this device can help their defense in court.
Either way, I don't see how this device is making things worse.
FWIW I do not think driving high is safe at all, but I don't think it's a serious problem either (by the numbers).
Legalization has taken away the police's ability to target for consumption, and removed their ability to ruin people's lives for it. That's huge. And the gov't will now be providing a way for people to strike old possession crimes from their record, apparently.
1. You turn 16. You drive on the simulator - if you pass, you do a real drive with a human tester.
2. In 5 years when you renew your license, you go on the simulator again. If you pass, you get to renew your license. No human-in-car test required.
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The advantages:
- This covers things we can't currently test for:
- It's exact - there is no interpretation by a person.- It's an actual impairment/ability test. Rather than putting a number on how much {x} you consumed - it measures what matters.
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For accessibility issues, traditional driving tests (and blood tests for impairment) would have to be used. If your vision doesn't allow you to test on the simulator - you take a physical driving test with a person. Simulator tests can't be used for impairment.
Other interesting ideas:
- Insurance rates based on your score in the simulator (not sure if this would be fair, or could be abused - but thought it was an interesting idea).
- We could have data for how your driving ability degrades with age.
- It should maybe be codified that equipment changes (new simulators, etc.) are not allowed between a test and impairment test. So the state would need to keep old equipment around for 5 years for migration.
> Any reasonable device of this kind would fail a nonzero perccentage of sober drivers and pass a nonzero percentage of intoxicated drivers. And not just because of noise -- some people drive worse sober than others do high. So don't hold your breath waiting for laws to allow it.
Yeah I agree that people will take issue with that. I personally don't care what someone did 15 minutes before getting into their car, so long as they can safely drive.
Anyway, I thought this was fun to think about. It seems like a really nice solution. I'd love to hear some more reasons why it wouldn't work!
I seem to recall reading that almost all cases of accidents where the driver tested positive for cannabis, there was another drug involved - usually alcohol.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's OK to drive under the influence of any psychoactive drug - it's plainly not. But I worry that legalised cannabis is going to be demonised by people with something to sell, and about the motivations of the sellers.
Can this detect THC that has been consumed by means other than smoking? Vaporizing? Edibles? Tincture?
EDIT: And that means you'll never get accurate numbers on consumption/offense rates. So using those numbers is fully questionable.
That leaves reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt favors the accused. If your device removes reasonable doubt, it does not benefit the accused.
In many (most?) states you can refuse the blood test, until they get a warrant, even though you cannot refuse the Breathalyzer. I believe this will be used as a tool to make arrests and generate probable cause which will then immediately be used to obtain a warrant and blood test, which will hold up in court much better than the Breathalyzer alone or nothing at all.
I'm sorry, but even if this product works perfect technically I see it harming more people than it helps. Throw in chance of false positives and likely hood it is used by biased individuals in a biased way (only some individuals are told to blow multiple times, etc) and I really believe this product deployed in America would have a negative impact on most people.
I've consumed it many times, and I know how impaired I'd be behind the wheel. It terrifies me to think of all the idiots who are probably out there driving while stoned, pretending they're "perfectly fine."
EDIT: cool, these guys are around the corner from where I'm sitting (Google Waterloo) in our old office building. Best of luck!
https://www.nber.org/papers/w24417
Those three can really affect my driving.
In my experience cannabis just destroys my ability to context switch effectively. Other people, not so much. Electronics in the car are already a distraction, but I suspect far worse for someone impaired.
I think this is another key point in favor of this device. The traffic safety data that exists comes from police reports. Each officer has to key in the information when they handle an accident, so having a device like this in the hands of those officers is the first step in starting to build that kind of data set.
Perhaps that indicates an opportunity - if there was a way to check for stoned drivers, it might have gone down.
maybe you can hypothesize some weird situation where individual drivers are worse, but overall traffic is unaffected. but individual users should still want to avoid driving high, as lower overall traffic deaths will not make you feel better about accidentally killing someone.
Driving with an anger management issue is a much more serious problem in my experience. Why don't we test for that?
Edit: I'm also an all-day pothead (yeah, I've obviously got my vices...) and I don't trust everyone to be able to react quickly or remain focused or not get paranoid when they're stoned and driving.
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs#Arrests_and_incarcer...
with all due respect, I hope you fail miserably.
https://madd.ca/pages/impaired-driving/overview/cannabis-and...
It is. I've been pulled over a few times in my life. Never had a breathalyzer test done, because they assumed (correctly) that I hadn't been drinking. But human observation is far from perfect. And even harder to defend in court.
> Then if suspected after being pulled over, tested clinically. This is not that difficult.
What does "tested clinically" mean. If you mean a breathalyzer for cannabis, well then that's what this is. If you mean a blood test, well, it's pretty hard to get someone to a lab in time to detect meaningful levels of THC from recent smoking, as the poster of the Launch HN notes. It is pretty difficult.
> Even if a certain level of any substance is detected and measured, level of impairment is not.
This is tricky. As with alcohol, different people have different tolerances. Some people can have one drink and feel tipsy, others don't feel it at all. So we set a legal limit for how much alcohol you can have in your blood, regardless of how you feel. You have to draw the line somewhere and we've decided as a society to set it at a point that's more conservative in order to reduce accidents related to drunk driving. And there are plenty of drunk driving accidents. This would do the same thing with pot. Yes, you might feel perfectly fine, but I don't want your subjective opinion of how well you think you can drive under the influence of marijuana to be the determining factor in whether we let you drive after smoking pot or not. If you want to smoke, stay put or take an uber.
Couldn't you approach the same problem by testing the capabilities of the driver rather than testing the amount of a substance in their system (after all there are countless substances than can impair a driver, not just alcohol and marijuana)? Would an improved field sobriety test be a more appropriate product than an improved breathalyzer?
Yes, do you have such a test?
Meanwhile, this product tests for something that's easy and simple. Have you recently used marijuana? It gives a yes or no (and presumably a level of some sort). It's not the perfect test, but it seems like a fallacy to argue against this test on the basis of a better test that doesn't currently exist.
It doesn't even have to be about roads, "Hey Gary, Bob needs to do some shirt laundry if you know what I mean"
Steve: "Bob, can you come see me in my office please"
has general conversation with Bob about performance and the local Sportsball team, determines he thinks Bob is high
Steve: "Bob, before I let you go back out there on the assembly line operating that dangerous equipment, I'm sorry but I'm going to have to ask you to blow into this device. You smell like you've been out there dabbing for an hour straight and I asked you what you thought about last night's Sportsball game and you just smiled and nodded for a solid 5 seconds before asking what we were talking about".
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It can also be used in prisons/jails that have work release programs, where residents are released during the day to work leading up to their release and have to come back in the evening. They already do breathalyzer and random urinalysis on these folks.
Similarly parole officers could benefit from this.
Hospitals could also use it to determine if a patient is under the influence of THC instead of something else that may cause complications with their treatment in the ER and if this can be used for THC I suspect it could have other recreational drug applications too which again, will benefit treatment in the ER when patients aren't always willing to volunteer what they are on for fear of legal implications.
Can you device detect Rx painkillers and sedatives? Those are already proven to reduce reaction times etc while such studies for mj are lacking. Why don't you go after those drivers? No need to reply, the answer is quite obvious.
https://mass-cannabis-control.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01...
We know there's a direct correlation between alcohol levels and driving impairment, but I've not seen evidence for this link with THC. Are there studies that have found this? (Please forgive my ignorance...)
If someone uses X amount of marijuana (what this tech can establish), do we know that this will always have effect Y on the driver?
For example I know people who are heavy marijuana smokers who can smoke a whole joint and you'd never know whereas someone right next to them will take one puff and lose their mind.
That's not the relation we have with alcohol, either; we have an on-averagr relationship. Which is why drunk driving laws tend to prohibit both being actually impaired by alcohol regardless of BAC and having a BAC over a certain level even without any other evidence of impairment.
Drugged driving laws generally prohibit actual impairment due to any drug (including marijuana/THC), without specifying testing thresholds as an alternative basis, largely because we don't have as much testing levels vs. impairment data for other drugs.
A test could provide evidence supporting the conclusion that observed erratic behavior was impairment due to the drug without being compared against a fixed “prohibited” threshold.
Emphasis on this.
I am surprised by the amount of comments here that seem like they are more or less arguing against enforcement of DUI laws that will save lives.
This is an ill-conceived solution to exacerbate an existing injustice: uneven prosecution of laws in the War on Drugs.
Shame on you.
I think it is important to recognize that the way drug impaired driving is tackled today is very subjective. Police administer an field sobriety test that involves walking in a straight line, standing on one foot, and touching their nose. They are then able to arrest the individual solely based on their opinion regarding impairment, which is susceptible to their personal biases. Our device can take out a lot of the guesswork and help eliminate biases from the equation.
Also, our device it not assisting police it arresting people for owning or even selling cannabis, just using it before driving. Not only that, but by detecting only recent use, it will reduce the instances of frequent users being improperly charged due to blood tests with large windows of detection.
At what levels of THC concentrations is driving empirically impaired and is this measurement consistent across everyone? What evidence do you have to support that THC impairs driving?
The Government of Canada has already legislated [0] that THC impairs driving and that the per-se limit is 2ng of THC per ml of blood. I'm certain this YC company had nothing to do with lobbying for that legislation and that it would have been passed with or without them.
Surely if there is someone to blame for setting nonsensical limits, you should blame the government and the hysterical voters who elect them.
[0] https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/sidl-rlcfa/qa2-qr2.html
Response to my comment:
>"our device it not assisting police it arresting people for owning or even selling cannabis, just using it before driving."
Product desription from original post:
>"... we're imagining a world where there are one of our devices in every police car in North America."
And it sounds like a dystopian nightmare. This isn't about improving anything but getting a slice of the pie that serves the law enforcement industrial complex. The same one that disproportionately targets minorities and those without the means to defend themselves in court.
And that's just the intended use case, much less other use cases that it's applied to.
Truly awful product idea that will make society much worse off.
Curious why all the negativity, perhaps people are unaware that cannabis actively DOES impair driving to dangerous levels. Also, as this startup is from Canada I'm almost certain the mindframe of the founders is to develop a device that makes legalization EASIER, not allowing police to use it catch and arrest people on the street who they think are high.
One issue we have been dealing with in Canada is how to regulate driving after consuming cannabis. A zero tolerance policy for smoking + driving within days is unreasonable and thus will be ineffective. This device and the research behind it looks like could help regulators and police catch people who are dangerously high while not arresting those who happened to smoke much earlier.
That study is about alcohol combined with cannabis (i.e. presuming effect then striving to find a cause).
Disclaimer: I have never been a cannabis user.
> Experienced smokers who drive on a set course show almost no functional impairment under the influence of marijuana, except when it is combined with alcohol
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/#S3titl...
The tl;dr is Cannabis absolutely impairs the core skills you use when driving, but also raises your awareness of your impairment so those under the influence tend to drive more cautiously. The result is in simulator studies cannabis shows a clear negative effect, but in functional studies, its more of a wash.
> Experienced smokers who drive on a set course show almost no functional impairment under the influence of marijuana, except when it is combined with alcohol.
And the conclusion that the lack of functional impairment is due to increased awareness of impairment is merely speculation and is not based on any empirical result.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2722956/#S3titl...
The study contradicts your assertions and does so in a rigorous controlled study. Obviously that holds more weight than your anecdotes or statements that have no empirical or logical basis.
Yes, we need to be certain that this isn't giving false positives. But if anything, this is step towards more legalization efforts on the whole (and fewer people driving high).
Also, FWIW, if it's legal, in some places you can even order it for delivery ( http://dutchie.com ) which certainly beats being out on the road.
Right now it’s just completely subjective and that makes it easy for someone to justify DUI when they would never do so if similarly impaired by alcohol.
We need research and education as much as (and probably more than) enforcement.
Edit: What do you think would happen if we made a strict law that anything more than 0.0% BAC = a DWI? My guess is you’d end up with a lot fewer slightly intoxicated drivers, and a lot more extremely intoxicated drivers, because people will figure they might as well just drink as much as they want if they’re already breaking the law anyway.
I understand that everyone reacts differently to different drugs. Dale Earnhardt can probably be a little tipsy and still drive better than me. But even if you are an above average driver, it's still immoral (and I think should be illegal) to use substances that will increase your risk of killing someone else in a car accident, even if you are having a small amount of those substances that just brings you down to average driver levels.
Car accidents are one of the leading causes of death. It's an inherently risky activity to be doing every day. But we've structured our society in a way that makes it unavoidable. Given that it's dangerous even for sober people, I don't think we should be giving people the right to drive under circumstances that make it even more dangerous.
[0]: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11547199/Not-dr...
On June 12th Colorado alone surpassed 1 billion dollars in legal marijuana sales [1]
Let's be overly optimistic and assume an average customer in Colorado has spent $5,000 that means you have 200,000 customers. That's 200,000 people potentially driving while high.
How many people, of legal driving age, are dehydrated to the point of intoxication in/visiting Colorado during that time period? I'm guessing less than a thousand, probably less than 100.
[1](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/10/colorado-cannabis-sales-hit-...)
> "To put our results into perspective, the levels of driver errors we found are of a similar magnitude to those found in people with a blood alcohol content of 0.08%"
This is just comparing against the lower limit of what we legally allow. Clearly, many drunk drivers are far drunker than this.
But in any case, I don't think it's "just public pressure to enforce moral values". You can't legally drive on Ambien, but this is a prescribed drug that I don't think people have a moral issue with.
While I think the dehydration example above is probably a stretch since it's not really as bad as alcohol, there are other things that are. I'm pretty sure driving with lack of sleep is pretty bad. But it's just not practical to test for it as far as I know.
Oh please. Alcohol accounts for 30ish percent of driving fatalities. Even if dehydration is equally dangerous (a big if) it’s still far less prevalent. Maybe that’s the reason there’s no law about it.
Someone just over the legal alcohol limit could be less impaired than a drowsy, sober driver, but the former would be more likely to be blamed for an accident than the latter, especially in areas with really low limits (e.g. it's 0.05% here in Utah).
1. It only had 12 participants 2. One of those participants was excluded from the final results 3. They didn't test the participants' (or a separate group's) driving ability while under the influence of alcohol (they used a simulator, so it would have been fine), and so you really can't use the results to make any comparisons between dehydration and alcohol use 4. The study was funded by the European Hydration Institute
[0]: https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/bitstream/2134/20400...
Said no officer ever
I can't imagine a situation where an officer would employ the use of a breathalyzer and we worry about discretion. The officer used their discretion to pull the motorist over. They used their discretion to perform a sobriety test. They used their discretion to employ a breathalyzer.
Point is, if the cop wanted to let you off there are numerous occasions to do so.
Loads of people make the choice every day to drive while distracted, texting while driving, etc. I see that as a far greater threat that needs to be addressed, and none of those things can be "tested" for when you get pulled over.
I have recorded lots of videos of these behaviours, many with plate and driver face clearly visible, and my local police service just has zero interest in following up on it. There are hotspot intersections I've informed them about where they could set up shop and nail 10-20 drivers an hour for convictions with tickets ranging from $200 to $1000, but I guess they're too busy idling in parking lots waiting for that high priority call to come in.
So, driving high is totally a problem and going to be increasingly a problem, especially in Canada. But based on what I see in my community, it's not clear that the police have any interest at all in proactive enforcement, especially in service of road safety.
They should still be listening to your complaints, however. Hope you have better luck in the future.
For any new human endeavor which could negatively impact my life in any way I start with the assumption that whatever measure is undertaken will do nothing to address the actual problem AND whatever can possibly go wrong will.
From there I'm willing from there to be convinced that the people are uncommonly capable and ethical in theory.
I am not a chemist nor biologist, but ethanol escapes through mucus membranes and afaik, thc does not.
So, I am curious what mechanism has thc in the breath while people are “impaired” but not while they are heavy users that haven’t had any thc for 24 hours.
In general, it appears that it is a mix of deposition directly into the lungs and diffusion from the blood stream. Other non-volatiles, such as other drugs of abuse taken intravenously, have been detected in breath before. I would check out the research done by Olof Beck. He is fairly prolific in this space.
We are actually testing edibles right now, so we will know more in the coming months.
Questions:
- What do you think the likelihood/timeline is that these tests will eventually be comparable in speed and accuracy to alcohol breathalyzers?
- Have you yet looked into the legal implications of a cannabis breathalyzer? Does it fall under the same rules and restrictions of a standard breathalyzer?
- How rigorously are you testing for false positives? Can you tell someone who has taken drugs but they have worn off vs someone who is currently high?
- Will you be making your data open source? Companies that sell proprietary technology to police departments can notoriously complicate legal cases when they do not disclose technical limitations or the possibilities of false positives or negatives.
- Will you be restricting your product sales only to regions where marijuana is already legal? (If it's already illegal, they have other more accurate ways of establishing possession, I presume they shouldn't need this device except for nefarious purposes).
- Speed isn't so much of a problem. Accuracy is by-far the most important piece of this puzzle. I think it will be between 12-18 months until we see real, robust, repeatable science to discuss the accuracy of testing in breath.
- Legal implications of a cannabis breathalyzer are all based on two things: 1. use cases and 2. geographic location. Whether the device will be used for pre-arrest or post-arrest is something we're working on understanding better.
- There is a lot of work still to do on determining our false-positive rate. We're actually going to be doing an IRB approved human trial later this year, and we'll report back to you with our findings and the full report!
- Regarding open sourcing our tech- to be honest, we haven't really thought about this yet. Might be a good way improve transparency? We're definitely not opposed!
- That's also a great question. Our tech is most useful in places where it's already legal. So that's where we'll start.
Hope this helps!
Even when driving, you have the right to revoke it (other bad things happen, like taking your license away, but you can still refuse).
Taking a random standerby and breathalyzing him without consent or a warrant would be wrongful search and seizure.
How does this react to other forms of cannabis ingestion (edible, topical)?
Is there science behind cannabis impairing your ability to drive like alcohol or is this just a hypothesis that you are willing to make money off of?
Are you OK with your technology potentially targeting minorities and continuing the war on cannabis which was based almost entirely on racial motives in the first place?
What levels of cannabis are in your views "acceptable"?