Too Stoned to Drive? Find Out with This App

Are you riding the high from that last rip but feeling hungry and unsure if you are too high to drive?

Like pretty much everything else, there’s an app for that. No, not Papa John’s (though that works too).

The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) created a simple app called My Canary. While the name confuses us, the app itself has a solid function. The app will determine whether a person is impaired by conducting a series of tests measuring the user’s coordination, reasoning, reaction time, and balance. These tests include remembering a sequence of numbers, playing some whack-a-mole, balancing on one foot, and estimating a time of 20 seconds without a reference point. It then compares your scores to averages from sober people and displays a red, yellow, or green sign to tell you whether you are good to go. You can even do it yourself sober, so you have a more personalized, accurate baseline to compare your results to.

The app is based on 60 years of technical and legal experience using studies from NASA, the NHTSA, and the DOD, as well as thousands of others specific to marijuana use.

One of the neat things about the app is that it attempts to measure impairment, not the THC content of the driver’s blood, which is of dubious use in determining driver safety, as we have discussed in previous blogs. For more information on Colorado marijuana use you can visit our resources page, which links to several marijuana resources.

P.S. Our leading theory on the name involves miners bringing canaries into mine shafts to detect toxic gas. If the canary dies, get out! If the sign is red, don’t drive! It’s a bit of a stretch.