Florida’s population is 53% white, 17% black, and 26% Hispanic. This is important, because the Florida highway patrol did a study of the race and ethnicity of those who are pulled over by police. They found that 55% of those stopped where white, 22% black, and 18% Hispanic.
In other words, the claim that blacks are targeted for traffic stops by racist police officers is false.
Thanks to Big Country, I saw a story that came out yesterday about the Seattle Police Department no longer performing traffic stops. I met my wife after work last night- we went to the house of one of her friends. Another of her liberal teacher friends who was there was talking about this story with me. He is all in favor of it. I shot several holes in his argument.
His claim was that there is no reason for police to do a traffic stop when they can simply take down your tag number and mail a ticket to your house. Traffic stops, he says, are an escalation and almost ensures that the subjects of these stops will be nervous or scared, thus also ensuring that there will be some kind of violence that will end with the police shooting people.
I replied, “So you don’t think the cops should ever stop anyone?” He replied no, and I told him that as a paramedic who has responded to perhaps 25,000 car accidents in his career and seen hundreds of fatalities as a result, that I disagree. People would soon drive even worse than they already do. He replied that people mainly have any good driving habits because they are afraid of getting a ticket, so mailing out those tickets would have the same effect.
This was where I laughed and said, “I will just remove the license plate from my car and never get another ticket in my life. After all, if there are no traffic stops, without a tag, you have no idea where to send the ticket.”
His reply was that, of course police would stop you for no tags. I said, “Oh, so SOME traffic stops are ok?” He says yes, in cases where there are no tags, or for safety reasons. So now I move on to- what about suspected DUI? Yes. What about someone speeding? Yes, but only if someone is 25 mph or more over the speed limit. What would prevent the police from simply lowering speed limits by 25 mph? What about the kid who gets hit by a car going 44 mph in a school zone?
So then he moved the goalposts. He said that his problem was that the police use traffic stops to profile people. His daughter (white, liberal, purple hair and many piercings) lives in a ghetto, all black neighborhood and drives a red, lowrider Honda with dark tinted windows. She “gets pulled over all of the time” they question her and then “let her go because she is white.”
I said, “But profiling works.” He replied: “What?”
“Look, you are a cop. You are trying to prevent crime, or at least catch a criminal. It’s kind of your job. Which scenario will likely accomplish that- Stopping a 60 year old man driving a Lexus in a neighborhood of half million dollar homes, or a red Honda with dark tinted windows and a coffee can muffler being driven by a couple of white kids in an all black neighborhood that is notorious for drug sales and random drive by shootings?”
To his credit, he admitted that the Honda is most likely. Then I said, “Could it be that they let your daughter go because they could see that she wasn’t breaking the law, and not merely because she was white? Is it possible that they let black people go without a ticket as well?”
Then I had to let it go, because my wife was giving me “the look” for grilling her coworkers.
The fact is this: Florida did a study of traffic stops. They found out that blacks are not stopped in numbers that are out of proportion to the population of the areas where the stop is made. That is, in areas where all of the residents are black, police stop- mostly black people. Not because they are black, but because that is who is driving in that area.
So that was quick. The job that I applied for two days ago? They called me while I was at work on Thursday morning and had a telephone interview. Nothing like interviewing for a job while you are at work.
Two hours later, they called and offered me the job. The offer was laughable. The woman said “We are making this offer in consideration of your four college degrees, as well as your 22 years of experience.” Then she told me what they were willing to pay: $16 per hour.
I told her that this was FAR too low. An entry level job running a cash register at a convenience store in this area pays more than that. I know, because my high school students were getting jobs at that rate of pay. I don’t know what kind of medical employee you think you are getting for that, but it won’t be me. I would sooner not work at all.
So, the search for a job continues.
We see how a large group of feral blacks conspired to illegally enter an occupied building of a school, where they entered a classroom and attacked a 14 year old girl, causing her injury before attempting to flee the scene.
I can’t tell you NC law, but in Florida:
If black lives really matter, the BLM group will support hefty sentences for this, but you know that they won’t.
A website is being used to produce and distribute child porn. I assume all of the web hosts like AWS will deplatform them. Or are they all to busy trying to keep Donald Trump from saying that China caused COVID, that the election was rigged, and that Biden is a senile fraud?
An armed teacher stops an attempted abduction. This should serve as a lesson for those opposed to armed teachers and to those who claim that there is no such thing as a good guy with a gun .
Guess who came to see me today? The doctor from this post. Yes, he is still wearing two masks. No, I was not wearing one. Also no, he didn’t say a word. Now that the CDC has declared him to have been wrong the entire time, he is being much nicer.
He was actually really nice and even thanked me for helping him with a few of his patients today.
President Biden has ordered the USS Ronald Reagan out of the Pacific theater and into the Indian Ocean to support the Afghanistan withdrawal. For the next four months, there will not be an aircraft carrier battlegroup in the Pacific.
A comment on this morning’s post will make a good post for today.
Cannabis has no LD50 (no lethal overdose)
ANY substance has an LD50 dose: Aspirin, Tylenol, salt, sugar, Nicotine, even water. Contrary to what stoners would have you believe, there is a way to overdose on marijuana. The people who advocate for weed are either making money from it, getting high from it, or are just plain uninformed on the subject, and will claim that it is harmless. While marijuana is safer than most other recreational drugs, there is still a risk there.
Before we begin, in the interest of full disclosure: I feel that the war on drugs does more harm than good, and I think that marijuana should be legal. I also think that people who smoke weed now are mostly inconsiderate assholes who force those of us who choose NOT to use marijuana to put up with that horrible smell AND their juvenile antics.
Let’s begin with a point that is almost never talked about: smoking marijuana carries all of the risks of smoking: lung cancer, emphysema, etc. The lungs aren’t helped by deliberately inhaling large quantities of smoke. This makes smoking marijuana more dangerous than ingesting it.
How about the reason why people smoke: the THC?
Years ago, I was the first paramedic to treat a patient who had overdosed on what the patient referred to as “legal weed,” which later turned out to contain a synthetic form of THC called “Spice,” which is 40 times more potent than natural THC. It caused me to do a lot of research on marijuana and the possibility of overdose.
Let’s start with a discussion of the lethal dose for various common substances.
Benno Hartung et al. (2014) report that the lethal half dose (LD50) for THC in humans is estimated to be around 30 mg/kg. This means that approximately 2 grams (.07 ounces) of pure THC has a 50% chance of killing a 150 pound man. This is the amount of THC found in 10 grams (.35 ounces) of high grade weed with 20% THC content. Moreover, the DEA reports that concentrated THC derivatives known variously as “wax,” “dabs,” or “butane hash oil” consisting of up to 80% THC are now available on the streets; one tenth of an ounce of these would contain a lethal half dose of 2 grams of THC. Robert Gable (2004) also reports that the lethal half dose of marijuana is about 15 grams or one half ounce; however, he does not specify the THC percentage of the marijuana.
The reason why marijuana gets this reputation for being impossible to OD on is the relationship between the amount of THC it takes reach intoxication, versus the amount it takes for a fatal dose.
The issue here is not so much the total lethal dose, but how close you must be to the lethal dose in order to get the effect you are looking for. The largest cluster of substances has a lethal dose that is 10 to 20 times the effective dose: These include cocaine, MDMA (often called “ecstasy”) and alcohol. A less toxic group of substances, requiring 20 to 80 times the effective dose to cause death, include Rohypnol (flunitrazepam or “roofies”) and mescaline (peyote cactus). The least physiologically toxic substances, those requiring 100 to 1,000 times the effective dose to cause death, include psilocybin mushrooms and marijuana, when ingested. This makes marijuana safer than alcohol, MDMA, and other drugs, but it is not proper to say that there is NO risk.
I’ve found no published cases in the that document deaths from smoked marijuana, so the actual lethal dose is a mystery. Smoking marijuana is less risky than eating it from an overdose perspective because not all of the marijuana smoked is absorbed.
So now you know.
However, whenever I have posted about weed in the past, I always get tons of uninformed pro weed stoners coming by to tell me how wrong I am. I am not interested in that debate, so comments on this post and the earlier one will be closed. It just isn’t something that I want to debate, nor do i want this blog to become a blog about the risks and benefits of marijuana.
This news story is right in line with what happened in my family. I got a panicked phone call from my brother. It seems that his son, who still lives with his parents, has a medical marijuana card. He heard his mother say that she was stressed out, so he decided to use some of his weed to make her some brownies.
She ate five of them before her son told her to slow down and confessed to what was in them.
She began freaking out.
So now my brother is calling because she is worried that she is going to overdose. I explained to him that the best thing that they can do is wait for it to wear off. He asked if they should go to the hospital and I advised them that there is nothing they can do for her at the hospital.
They decided to go anyway. Soooo, after a $1,000 copay and 6 hours in the emergency room, she was again sober. They didn’t do a thing for her apart from letting her sit in the waiting room while the effects wore off.
I got a good laugh out of it.