Last week’s contest was won by Ludicrus Maximus. It was Barcelona, Spain.

This week’s is another random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Ben Livingston writes in Slog about how the state Office of Financial Management was using some fuzzy calculations to overestimate the tax revenues that’ll be generated by I-502. It’s not terribly unusual to see drug law reformers overstating this case, but it’s a clear sign of how times have changed when a state agency is doing it.

This concern over failing to pull in the expected revenues from I-502 is echoed by Mark Kleiman, the state’s new “pot consultant”, in his recent interview on TVW (which you can see at the bottom of Livingston’s post). From that same interview, Kleiman is additionally concerned about whether people who are already in the medical marijuana community will switch over to the non-medical market when it’s available:

Washington state many he headed toward a situation where recreational sales of marijuana are not profitable due to heavy taxes, regulations and, most importantly, competition from the untaxed “collective gardens” where the state’s medical marijuana is grown, Washington’s newly hired pot consultant said last week.

“Any revenue estimate depends on actually having people come to the licit market rather than having them use one of the parallel markets,” UCLA professor and author Mark Kleiman commented last week’s episode of the Washington-based news program “Inside Olympia.” “What if you gave pot legalization and nobody came? It is entirely possible that by the time we finish regulating and taxing this product, it’s going to be uncompetitive with what you can get at the collective gardens.”

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Last week’s contest was won by poster child. It was the CERN Large Hadron Collider facility along the Switzerland-France border.

This week’s location is another random place on earth, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was the Skagit Valley Hospital in Mt. Vernon.

This week’s is related to something in the news from March, good luck!

– Mark Kleiman has won the contract to be the main consultant for the implementation of I-502. Like most drug law reformers, I’ve had strong disagreements with him, but I think he can be a good fit for this role. And this is yet another foot forward in legitimizing what the voters have demanded, a legal and regulated market for marijuana that parallels alcohol in many ways.

– Representative Chris Hurst (D-Crazytown) has decided that I-502 needs some fixing. Amazingly, we agree on one aspect, his desire to have the 1000ft rule reduced to 500ft. And we agree over why (because it will likely push more marijuana retail outlets into the suburbs). We just disagree over why that’s a problem. But for all else, I have little regard for what Hurst thinks, since he’s the reason we had to pass this thing as a voter initiative in the first place. If he wanted to provide input on this initiative, he had his chance last winter when it first went to the legislature. He didn’t, so maybe next time, instead of being a whiny asshole after the fact, he’ll do his job in the first place.

– The Seattle Times editorial board is absolutely right to criticize Washington’s Congressional delegation for failing to be more vocal in support of I-502. The voters of this state overwhelmingly passed this initiative, yet neither Senator (nor even Jim McDermott!) has spoken out to see that it be implemented without federal interference.

– Some community members in Rainier Valley are upset at the large number of dispensaries that have set up shop there recently. There’s an easy solution to this – just wait. Dispensaries currently use a very creative interpretation of the 10-member rule (when you’re there obtaining medicine, you become a member, and when you leave you stop being a member). For the time being, law enforcement (particularly in Seattle) has little interest in challenging them. However, once I-502 is implemented and there are state-licensed retail outlets, I’m betting that the hammer will come down on the folks who try to stick with the “collective garden with a storefront” model. Especially if they’re not conforming with the 1000ft rule in I-502, which requires all retail outlets to be 1000ft from a school, park, and other places where children congregate.

– A Seattle entrepreneur is planning to turn a vacant Pacific County sawmill into a marijuana production facility. I think it can be somewhat overstated how much the marijuana industry alone can help the economy, but it’s still great to see it might allow for the re-purposing of old facilities and bringing new jobs to this state’s small towns.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Arleta, CA, just outside of LA.

This week’s location is somewhere in Washington state, good luck! And Happy St. Patty’s Day!

Last week’s contest was won by Geoduck. It was near Marston, MD.

This week’s is back to Google Maps, a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

Last week’s contest was won by Ted. It was JJ’s restaurant in Kansas City, the site of a tragic fire last month.

This week’s contest is a random location somewhere on earth, good luck!

In Saturday’s post on the recent DUI updates, I wrote:

And assurances from the police that they’ll only go after impaired folks requires a lot of skepticism given the history of DUI enforcement.

I wanted to elaborate on this a bit, but didn’t want to go off on any other tangents in that post. So I’ll go off on that tangent here. And a recent case from Kent is a good starting point:

Mike Simmons, 31, said Tuesday he was put in jail for 13 hours. Now with towing and lawyer fees, he said he’s out $5,000 and he’s not allowed to drive while he’s out on bail.

All for something he said he didn’t do.

“As soon as the officer came to the vehicle, he asked me to stick out my tongue,” said Simmons.

Simmons thought it was an unusual request but he soon found out he was pulled over for suspicion of driving under the influence.

Simmons said the officer told him there was a green film on his tongue. The unidentified police officer apparently felt that is a telltale sign that someone has been smoking marijuana.

Simmons admitted he had smoked pot three days earlier, but says when he was pulled over he was on a lunch break from work and was stone-cold sober.

We’ll find out more about this specific case as it unfolds, but if Simmons’ recounting of the arrest is accurate, it wouldn’t be the first time an officer has used something ridiculous or imaginary to imply impairment. In this case from Ocean Shores in November, an officer claimed an elderly medical marijuana patient was impaired because – among other things – she was unable to stand on one leg.

To clarify a point that should be obvious to most people, your tongue doesn’t turn green when you smoke pot. So if that’s the evidence that this officer used to demonstrate impairment, and Simmons doesn’t win a lawsuit against the city of Kent as a result of that, then the folks who say that impairment is required to end up in his situation aren’t correct. Because if there are no repercussions for when a police officer does something wrong, it doesn’t matter what the law actually says.

We’ve continually heard from members of law enforcement and others that impairment is required in order to end up in Simmons’ situation. But it’s not hard for an officer to just say, “your eyes are bloodshot!” and use that as a justification to demand a blood draw. These reassurances go beyond being wishful thinking that their fellow police officers won’t abuse their power. They’re close to being outright lies.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky in an impressive 6 minutes. It was Pasco.

This week’s is related to something in the news from February. Good luck!

(Note: this image is NOT at the default ‘North is up’ orientation)

A few weeks back, the state legislature heard some testimony regarding the new DUI provisions enacted into law with the passage of I-502. These provisions were the most controversial aspect of the initiative among traditional drug law reformers, but throughout the entire campaign, there were very few actual numbers around to convey what the actual risk was.

For instance, how easy is it to be at the 5ng/ml limit? How long do people usually stay there? Is it an accurate measure of impairment? There have been a few studies on this, but far from any kind of consensus.

Also, how many people get marijuana DUI’s already? How many more are likely to get them now that prosecutions could be easier to obtain under I-502?

From the Seattle Times, here was what we learned about the latter set of questions from the testimony:

There has been no jump in “green DUIs,” said the Washington State Patrol’s toxicologist, Dr. Fiona Couper, at the hearing in Olympia Wednesday of the House Public Safety Committee. Seattle DUI attorney Patricia Fulton reported “absolutely no effect” in her defense practice.

This runs contrary to what other DUI attorneys have been saying.

A Seattle attorney whose practice consists solely of medical marijuana cases said more people are coming to him for help fighting charges of driving under the influence of marijuana, even before the new limit took effect.

“I’m seeing one to two a month and have been for a year,” attorney Aaron Pelley said. “Prior to that, I didn’t see really any.”

Pelley believes state patrol officers had been ramping up their enforcement of “green DUIs” in anticipation of the passage of I-502, the law making possession of up to an ounce of marijuana legal. And, now that it’s on the books, he suspects there’s been a “huge spike of number of people being tested.”

What’s the truth here? My guess is that Pelley, who’s been outspoken publicly about the DUI provisions, is generating more business for himself as a result, not that there are more people getting nailed.

So there isn’t much evidence the worst case scenarios are taking root, there’s still a concern with the basic effects of the new law:

Blood testing is not new and not done casually. It’s done at a medical center, and takes money and time. Couper said 1,000 to 1,100 drivers were tested last year statewide, with the median result slightly below 5 nanograms. About one-third also tested positive for alcohol.

If those numbers stay constant in 2013, it would mean that about 500 people tested for marijuana will have a much harder time defending themselves in court against a DUI charge than before I-502 became law. It’s possible that many of these are egregious cases where the DUI is deserved. But it’s also possible that many of them involve innocent medical marijuana patients being harassed. At this point, without more specific numbers, it’s not clear how much of each case we’re dealing with. And assurances from the police that they’ll only go after impaired folks requires a lot of skepticism given the history of DUI enforcement. What’s promising is that this issue has been generating a lot of media attention and that we’ll hopefully be able to highlight any cases where people get trapped in a truly unfair prosecution.

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Going back to the first set of questions above, how much is 5ng/ml, and what level of impairment does that really imply? Kiro7 recently aired an investigative report where they took 3 volunteers, had them smoke a popular and potent strain of marijuana, and let them drive around on a closed course. The video is here:

There are a couple of takeaways from this, but the main one is that even at 4, 5, and 7 times the new 5ng/ml legal limit, these volunteers drove fine. This was after consuming .3g. Of course, once they started smoking more than what people normally smoke in a sitting, their abilities tailed off.

Another key point is that even after these volunteers smoked themselves silly on nearly a gram of high quality marijuana and were driving like complete idiots, they all knew full well they were too stoned to drive (even the medical marijuana patient who was a heavy user). This is one of the main differences between alcohol and pot. People who drink too much alcohol become uninhibited along with their impairment, while marijuana users often become timid and cautious (although it was interesting to see that the medical marijuana user was a bit of an exception once they let her get behind the wheel). This is why alcohol-related reckless driving deaths are a frequent occurrence while it’s difficult to find too many instances of them with stoned drivers, even though impairment can occur from the over-consumption of each drug. People who are too stoned to drive often become reluctant to do it, and even if they do, they tend to drive really slow. People who are too drunk to drive often disregard the risks and drive very aggressively.

I’ve written in the past (sadly, the old Reload site is retired) about my own history with marijuana and driving, but didn’t discuss it much during the DUI debates of the I-502 campaign. My main reluctance has always been that it’s a difficult subject that generates mostly gut-level responses that don’t get us anywhere. This exercise provides enough data and visual evidence to at least begin discussing it rationally.

To recap, in my mid-20s for about 2 years, I smoked a small amount of pot at the beginning of nearly every drive I took (except for morning commutes, of course). There were two reasons for this. One, I was doing the hellish 520 commute from Seattle to my job at Microsoft and basically inched home at 2mph every day. And two, I’m a naturally fast driver and I found that pot would make me calmer and more relaxed as I drove. By that point, I’d already gotten somewhere around 7 or 8 speeding tickets in my life and was sick and tired of getting pulled over. Taking a hit off of a one-hitter made it far easier for me to obey the speed limits. In those two years, I was never pulled over for speeding – or for anything else – while stoned.

A one-hitter is a small smoking pipe, often made to look like a cigarette. Compared to what the volunteers in the Kiro7 experiment initially consumed, it probably only held about 1/3 of that, maybe .1g. I’d been wondering if the small amounts I was consuming in those days would even put me over the 5ng/ml limit. Looking at the data shown in the video, it probably was, but maybe not by a lot and probably for not very long.

From a safety standpoint, how safe this was is a matter of perspective and an interesting paradox. I always recognized two drawbacks to this. One, my navigational skills declined somewhat, so in the rare case where I was going somewhere new and was concerned I might get lost, I wouldn’t smoke. Two, my ability to react quickly and intelligently in the face of an emergency was also lessened. Thankfully, this never happened.

But to the outside observer, I was clearly a safer driver when I was stoned. Instead of being the guy weaving through traffic at 80 on I-5, I became the guy driving 55-60 in the right lane listening to some Percy Hill with a big fucking smile on my face. In my normal sober driving mode, I know I can drive safely at those high speeds, but to other drivers, I probably scare the shit out of some of them. And I draw the attention of the police, who like to give me very expensive speeding tickets.

After two years of this, I finally said “fuck it”, sold my car, and started taking public transportation for a little over 7 years. In 2010, after moving out to the suburbs, I once again have a car, but no longer smoke pot, so I have a radar detector in my Prius as I once again weave through rush hour traffic on I-5.

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The rationale behind the inclusion of DUI language in I-502 was always clear, even if the result in Colorado showed that it probably wasn’t necessary to win at the ballot box. But the political implications of having drug law reformers concede too much on this point continue to worry me. Other states are considering and even implementing proposals far worse than what we ended up with here. And when there’s an unchallenged notion that stoned driving and drunk driving are the same, it’s difficult to avoid any of these outcomes.

The point of my story wasn’t to argue that stoned driving is good or bad, but to recognize that the issue is a lot more complicated than many people initially assume. From a regulatory standpoint, doing things that have worked or been accepted for drunk driving may not be the correct approach at all for stoned driving.

Last week’s contest was won by wes.in.wa. It was Gijon, Spain.

This week’s location is somewhere in Washington state, good luck!

Dominic Holden writes about two King County Sheriff’s Deputies going through some withdrawal:

A man is being charged with a felony for selling $5 worth of marijuana to undercover officers, King County Superior Court records show, even though he never offered to sell any pot in the first place. Only after being lured with cash did the defendant agree to sell a joint.

According to records filed in January by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office, the incident began when two King County Sheriff’s deputies—Officer Escobar and Officer Schwab—boarded a Metro line last July in Tukwila for “a covert bus ride.” A 51-year-old black man who will remain nameless had also boarded the bus and struck up a “casual conversation” with one of the officers. That officer spontaneously brought up the subject of pot: “Detective Schwab told [the man] he was looking for marijuana.” According the the report, the man asked how much marijuana the undercover officer wanted (it must be noted that this part of the report seems odd, because, as you will see, the man shows no interest in selling marijuana nor has marijuana packaged for sale). After Detective Schwab said he wanted to buy $20 worth of pot, the man “told Detective Schwab that he only had a joint.” But the man did not offer to sell the joint, rather, he “offered to share it with Detective Schwab at the next bus stop,” the report continues. “Detective Schwab declined to smoke with him but offered to purchase the marijuana cigarette from him to smoke later.”

Finally, the man “agreed” to sell his joint for $5, the report explains, and officers arrested him. He reportedly told them that he “does not sell drugs and was only going to use the money to get to Tacoma.”

I-502 was supposed to force police officers to go cold turkey on the war on pot, but apparently some officers still can’t kick the habit.

UPDATE: In the comments, “Moderate Man” points out that the arrest was pre-502 (last July)

Last week’s contest was won by Dan Robinson. It was LP Field in Nashville.

This week’s is a view from Google Maps. This one’s pretty tough, so you can see a list of recently updated areas of coverage here. Good luck!

Due to my shameful 2-11 record in fantasy football this season, I welcomed the league to my house on Sunday for the game (it’s been a tradition for the last place finisher to host the Super Bowl every year). Our league started 15 years ago with a bunch of recently-transplanted Boeing engineers straight out of college. Most of us have left the company or been laid off, but a few of the original crew are still at the company. In talking to one of them this weekend, it’s clear that the battery problems with the 787 are a serious headache for Boeing, but many of the problems with the 787 were things that a lot of folks (even going back to when I was there and it was still the 7E7) were fully anticipating. And it sounds like some are starting to voice that a little more.

I left the company in 2000, but even prior to that, the vision of a global outsourcing model to build the next big Boeing plane had already been articulated. Some of the older folks in my group (I was a flight control test engineer) were nervous. Others were beyond nervous and predicting doom. One of them fired off a long, angry email to the all-company email list. He was reprimanded, but not fired. I’d love to read that email today, as I’d expect it would be like reading the scrolls of Nostradamus.

Outsourcing has occurred in a lot of different work environments. And in some of them, it’s arguably achieved its objectives – lower production costs with equal or near-equal production. But within the tech world, nearly all the attempts at outsourcing I’ve seen have been disasters. I’m not talking about just tech support or research or some specialized one-off skill, I’m talking about efforts to design, build, and test a large-scale development project with different project groups located around the globe. The logistical difficulties and communication issues involved quickly overwhelm your ability to move at the pace you need to move at.

Let me give a simple example more related to the world I currently inhabit, the world of software services and big data. This’ll be familiar to more people than the innards of a jumbo jet, but I promise I’ll get back to Boeing afterwards.

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