The federal government will spend more than $1.4 million to study how the concentration of marijuana compounds in people\u2019s breath changes over time after consuming it, part of an ongoing effort to create a reliable roadside test to screen drivers for recent cannabis use.<\/p>\n
In a brief \u201csources sought\u201d notice posted last week, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), a nonregulatory agency of the U.S. government, said it\u2019s looking for an vendor capable of helping to conduct a study that would collect breath and blood samples, then test those samples for evidence of acute cannabis use\u2014things like delta-9 THC, other cannabinoids and their metabolites.<\/p>\n
\u201cNIST intends to seek a contractor that will recruit participants to the study, collect breath samples from them after they use their own legal-market marijuana, and send those samples to NIST for laboratory analysis,\u201d Richard Press, the agency\u2019s acting director of media relations, told Marijuana Moment in an email. \u201cThe sources sought notice is to inform potential vendors of the requirements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite numerous efforts in the past decade to design and manufacture a device that works like a breathalyzer does for alcohol, there still exists no broadly accepted method to detect acute cannabis use in the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs cannabis\/marijuana use is legalized across the country, and knowing that its use can impair executive functions needed for driving, the need for a roadside technology to detect impairment from marijuana in drivers is critical.\u201d<\/p>\n
The upcoming study, dubbed Breath Measurements of Acute Cannabis Elimination, or BACE, \u201cwill look at how the concentration of cannabis compounds on a person\u2019s breath changes in the hours after using marijuana,\u201d Press said. \u201cThe study will not measure impairment, just concentrations of compounds in breath.\u201d<\/p>\n
The notice<\/a> says the study will entail taking both baseline and experimental samples from subjects, both before and periodically after consuming cannabis. The measurements are aimed to account for the fact that cannabis users sometimes retain THC in their breath even after periods of abstinence.<\/p>\n \u201cTo resolve the challenges of determining recent cannabis use from a single breath sample, we propose a paradigm shift: two breath samples spaced a short interval apart,\u201d says the project\u2019s funding description<\/a>. \u201cRecent cannabis use would be distinguished from abstinence by a slope consistent with acute cannabis elimination.\u201d<\/p>\n NIST will use the data \u201cto investigate the feasibility of a two-point measurement that could be implemented at the roadside,\u201d the funding description says. \u201cThe positive impact of this research on public safety will be a practical path towards a method that could be implemented at the roadside to chemically determine recent cannabis use.\u201d<\/p>\n The description adds that \u201ccurrently, it is impossible to draw a correlation between driving impairment and delta-9-terahydrocannabinol (\u03949THC) concentration in blood, which is the most reliable matrix with which to determine recent cannabis use.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe propose to collect breath samples from occasional and frequent cannabis users at 10-minute intervals during acute cannabis elimination, similar to the previous work, and during periods of abstinence, which has not been examined. The proposed paradigm shift depends on consistency in the collection of breath samples, therefore numerical modeling will characterize the influence of human (e.g. flowrate and volume) and device factors to improve the reproducibility of aerosol particle collection. We will analyze breath samples for \u03949THC, its metabolites, and other cannabinoids with high sensitivity analytical methods. We will employ urine analysis to classify users into occasional and frequent use populations and blood analysis to verify compliance with study protocols. Comprehensive statistical analyses will compare elimination profiles and abstinence profiles with different intervals (e.g., 10 minutes vs. 20 minutes) and will examine the multivariate response.\u201d<\/p>\n A federal grant of $1.45 million will pay for the research. That money was approved as part of a part of a $14.4 million forensic-science spending package<\/a> announced late last year.<\/p>\n Elected officials on the U.S. House Appropriations Committee said in June that they remain concerned about people driving under the influence of substances<\/a>. They urged regulators to continue \u201cefforts to ensure stakeholders can identify drug-impaired driving and enforce the law.\u201d<\/p>\n In May, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) urged the Department of Transportation to reform its cannabis testing policies<\/a> in light of the difficulty of determining recent use. He cited agency data showing that tens of thousands of truckers and other commercial drivers are penalized for using cannabis and noted that there\u2019s no way to tell whether that use was days or weeks ahead of when they were tested.<\/p>\n The congressman told Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that his department \u201cshould rapidly reform requirements for testing drivers and returning them to service, as well as develop an accurate test for impairment.\u201d<\/p>\n Data on highway safety and cannabis legalization is highly contentious, in large part because of the difficulty of accurately measuring the amount of cannabis in a person\u2019s system as well as its impact on driving ability.<\/p>\n A study published in 2019, for example, concluded that those who drive at the legal THC limit\u2014which is typically between two to five nanograms of THC per milliliter of blood\u2014were not statistically more likely to be involved in an accident<\/a>\u00a0compared to people who haven\u2019t used marijuana. But other studies have indicated possible increases in highway road deaths following adult-use legalization.<\/p>\n Yet other research has suggested that impaired driving actually goes down after legalization, at least according to self-reported surveys. A report published in April by the research nonprofit RTI International found that people were less likely to drive within three hours of consuming cannabis<\/a> in states where some form of cannabis was legal.<\/p>\n Another study this year found that auto-insurance premiums decreased<\/a> in states that legalized medical marijuana.<\/p>\n President Joe Biden, meanwhile, signed a large-scale infrastructure bill late last year that included an amendment encouraging states that have enacted legalization laws\u2014and only those states\u2014to educate people about impaired driving<\/a>. That measure was criticized by advocates who similarly want to discourage driving under the influence of cannabis but who also feel that any public education campaigns on the issue should be holistic, rather than singling out states that have legalized.<\/p>\n Officials have sometimes struggled to message their concerns about impaired driving. Last year the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) put out a PSA that featured a confusingly cool-looking cheetah<\/a> smoking a joint while driving in what critics called a questionable effort to deter such activity.<\/p>\n In 2020, NHTSA and the Ad Council teamed up with Vox Creative for another ad that essentially told consumers that they shouldn\u2019t drive while impaired\u2014even if they\u2019re being chased by a psychopathic axe murderer<\/a>.<\/p>\n Experts and advocates have emphasized that evidence isn\u2019t clear on the relationship between THC concentrations in blood and impairment.<\/p>\n Separately, the\u00a0Congressional Research Service in 2019 determined<\/a> that while \u201cmarijuana consumption can affect a person\u2019s response times and motor performance\u2026studies of the impact of marijuana consumption on a driver\u2019s risk of being involved in a crash have produced conflicting results, with some studies finding little or no increased risk of a crash from marijuana usage.\u201d<\/p>\n Another recent study found that smoking CBD-rich marijuana had\u00a0\u201cno significant impact\u201d on driving ability<\/a>, despite the fact that all study participants exceeded the per se limit for THC in their blood.<\/p>\n New Study Says Legalization Hasn\u2019t Caused More Teens To Try Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n The post Feds Seek Contractor To Help Test Marijuana Compounds In People\u2019s Breath<\/a> appeared first on Marijuana Moment<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The federal government will spend more than $1.4 million to study how the concentration of marijuana compounds in people\u2019s breath changes over time after consuming it, part of an ongoing effort to create a reliable roadside test to screen drivers for recent cannabis use. In a brief \u201csources sought\u201d noticeContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,15462],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56389"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56390,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56389\/revisions\/56390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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\nRead More: Feds Seek Contractor To Help Test Marijuana Compounds In People\u2019s Breath<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"