Why is it so hard to make a sobriety test for marijuana?

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On 8 November, voters in CaliforniaMaineMassachusetts and Nevada approved ballot measures to legalize recreational cannabis. It is now legal in a total of eight states. This creates potential problems for road safety. How do we determine who’s impaired and who’s not?

The effects of alcohol vary based on a person’s size and weight, metabolic rate, related food intake and the type and amount of beverage consumed. Even so, alcohol consumption produces fairly straightforward results: the more you drink, the worse you drive. Factors like body size and drinking experience can shift the correlation slightly, but the relationship is still pretty linear, enough to be able to confidently develop a blood alcohol content scale for legally determining drunk driving. Not so with marijuana.

We have a reliable and easy-to-use test to measure blood alcohol concentration. But right now we don’t have a fast, reliable test to gauge whether someone is too...

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