Marijuana and trucking....

Interesting, you drive for USA, the driver that killed my friends Aunt and Uncle, while high on a multitude of illegal drugs, drove for USA as well.........peas, pods.

 

Sept. 2014, good friend of mine passed away from a sudden blood clot in her lungs. At her wake, I found out that she had gotten out of court mandated rehab two months earlier. It was her 5th visit to rehab for marijuana addiction since she graduated HS in 1985. It was known that it cost her two of her three marriages, her last husband is a line haul driver/trainer for UPS, her pot habit almost cost him his job. He came to work one night, didn't realize his coat smelled like pot. Several people reported him, he was sent for a random immediately and taken off the road until the results came back. That night he gave her an ultimatum, pot or him. Two days later, while he was at work, she moved out. Her last relapse, that earned her court mandated rehab, was because she was found passed out in her car up against a traffic light. She had been smoking pot at a friends house and was driving home to her Mom's when she passed out at a intersection, luckily for her, it was 3 am, two hours later and it would have been a super busy intersection. The two witnesses to her accident said she was slowing for the light, then just rolled right through it, went over the curb and hit the light pole.

 

And you imbibe how much before driving?

 

I did 5 years in the USAF managed to get bachelor's degree from Western Michigan. got injured and was medically retired. Successfully raised 2 kids and put them thru college. Adopted my daughter 11 years ago. Her best friend now lives with us for the past 3 years because home life was horrible. Me and my wife pay her tuition to school so she be with my daughter for school. I'm one of the 47% who actually pay income taxes. Been married to 30 years to my wife. Have over 3 million consecutive safe miles. 26 years no accidents.
I haven't smoked pot in 26 years but yet I'm a burned out unproductive "scumbag" member of society and this industry. Simply because I believe it's none if my business if someone smokes a joint on their off duty time. And no I don't support driving impaired

 

Why would you think i do anything before driving?

 

Here is some more ....
One NHTSA study found that in 2009, 18 percent of drivers killed in an accident tested positive for at least one drug—an increase from 13 percent in 2005 (NHTSA, 2010). A 2010 study showed that 11.4 percent of fatal crashes involved a drugged driver (Wilson, 2010).
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/drugged-driving
If you wanna get high and drink, find another profession. Truck driving is THE most important service job in this country. We deliver every single thing to every single store and everything you own has been on a truck that one of us has driven. If you are so selfish that what you want to do, when you wanna do it, means more than the infrastructure of the United States of America, sit around and play your Xbox and leave the responsibility to those of us who refuse to put others at risk to enjoy the freedom we have.

Your right to freedom includes my right to be free from you.

 

They do in fact administer breathalyzer on the side of the road. If you fail the sobriety test, you blow right there. Refuse to blow or fail, go to jail. Recheck your facts please.

 

Sorry your friend died, but don't blame weed. Marijuana is not physically addictive, this had been proven by science. Your friend made the choice to continue smoking. Clearly she did not want to quit. And don't tell me it is mental addiction, because mental addiction is simply mental weekness, or a bs excuse someone uses because they so not want to quit something. I and many others have stopped smoking with no problem.

 

Long post, so bear with me.

You know how the synapses work, don't you. Children have rapid fire synapses. They're all over the place firing with blazing speeds. Somewhere along in our teens, we hardwire our programming, and with this programming, we use select synapses only, and shut down the synapses that we don't use. In other words, we program ourselves to 'think inside the box.' Once this happens, it becomes incredibly difficult to ever think outside the box again.

Now, the problem with being inside the box is that we might become unreasonable.


How would you reason with a student that his Sensei is a fraud? His synapses have been programmed to actually believe this.

The problem that happened n this thread was the original post was about weed. People jumped in and started attacking a driver for doing the correct action. They were defending weed. Defcon 3! It's what they do. It's the way their synapses fire. I took the opposite course and became unreasonable myself. Why?

'To the weak, I become weak that I may gain the weak.' To the unreasonable, I become unreasonable in hopes that they try to reason with me. But as soon as I try to reason, they once again become unreasonable. And I was trolling a bit too....

"Six, are you saying that weed is the cause of the synapse shutdown?"

No, not at all. Weed, the word, is the trigger. If we had taken the word WEED out of the original post, none of this would have happened. Remember the riots in Ferguson? Same concept, different subject matter. Everyone is unreasonable. But if the kid had been white, everyone would have been okay with his getting shot up.

If a person can be triggered to go to war over a word or a subject, and have no reasoning, do you not find that alarming? It's stupid actually. But Stupid can be dangerous, especially when he has friends. To be Stupid, you have to have intelligence. Stupid read the original post, and went to war to defend weed. Try to explain to him about the ticking time bomb, and Stupid digs in the trenches to defend weed to his dying breath. That driver was about to self destruct. GET HIM OUT OF THE TRUCK!

This was the reasoning. Safe as booze. Try to reason, "Is an open bottle of Jim Beam safe in a truck?"

And the synapses fire back in the predictable pattern

So get their attention by being unreasonable too, " You burnouts are a danger to society! A mind is a terrible thing to waste...yadda yadda." And they try to become reasonable. But as soon as you try to become reasonable, their synapses fire back on defense. "But weed is as safe as booze."

But what about the time bomb in the truck?

"Save the weed!"

 

This is all about opinions , both sides can cite facts , & figures , facts & figures that quite often contradict each other , but , at the end of the day , ( we all know this is a fact , and not debatable ) pot use is not tolerated in the trucking industry , no way , shape or form , what the OP did was correct , correct from this stand point.

The driver leaving his " stuff " in that slip seated truck put him ( the OP ) into a really sticky situation. If he hadn't found it , and had got pulled into an inspection , his livelihood would be done ( guilty because he was in control of that vehicle and it's content ). Do any of you folks think that for a nano second that the hand that left the contraband in the truck would have manned-up and admitted it was his ? I don't , simply because of the fact it was there to begin with...." Burners " like this hand have no respect for anything but their high , they'll get it whenever and however they can....that , to me is the definition of a " burner " , just like someone getting behind the wheel after having a single drink is drinking and driving , those 2 actions are 2 of the most selfish acts that an individual can perpetrate , since they're both simple choices...choices made without giving a single thought to the safety of anyone they meet while driving....

We can all have our own opinions on pot and it's use , that's a good debate , but when it's used illegally , as in this case , we should all agree that this hand ( the guy leaving the pot behind ) was way wrong....and The Patriot did the correct thing.....it's not about snitching , or dropping a dime on someone , it's about protecting everyone using the road , we all do that , along with our cumulative families , friends and strangers alike , and we as professional drivers actually have a duty to make sure we police ourselves...sorry for the rant......you folks carry on.