Updated on: 3/6/2019
The Man, it turns out, does not believe in the “contact high.” Or, to put it more accurately, the Man does not care how you got the idea into your head that you could get high from just being around real "hepcats."
He just cares if you put your high head in charge of driving a car.
Most people think of a “contact high” as the effect of secondhand marijuana smoke. Older individuals might recognize the term from when it was believed that sober people could become psychologically in tune with those using drugs just by being physically close to them.
Whether or not contact highs are real is scientifically cloudy.
According to researcher Cecilia J. Hillard of the Medical College of Wisconsin, human lungs don’t exhale much THC, leaving little for a non-smoking peer to absorb.
Anyone experiencing an altered state is likely only experiencing that state because they expect to be altered. The placebo effect at work.
So if you even simply think you’re high, you shouldn’t get behind the wheel. Washington police are ratcheting up DUI patrols, creating a dragnet to catch all impaired drivers, regardless of chosen means to get impaired. The bottom line is, we all want to eliminate drug-impaired and drunk driving accidents on Washington roads, rideshare programs are an obvious solution to preventing impaired people from getting behind the wheel.
How do Ride-Share Programs Affect DUI Rates?
But ride-sharing programs might be lowering the total number of impaired drivers on the roads. Uber wrote in a wonkish-but-fun post that entering the Seattle market could have decreased the amount of impaired driving by ten percent.
Police - particularly in the state of Washington - are largely skeptical. Maybe they want to credit their own drunk-driving elimination initiative Target Zero, a campaign initative tasked with eliminating DUI-related fatalities throughout the state by the year 2030.
ut skepticism is a required tonic to what may be a company trying to advertise itself in Nate Silver-style (the company also boasts an 80% decrease in DUIs among NFL players after offering them free rides).
Ultimately we can’t credit Uber with anything, but we might have new data to analyze for correlation soon: Lyft launched Friday in New York City.