The stench overrides your civil rights:
"State panel: Penalize drivers for pot like alcohol" by Naomi Martin Globe Staff December 22, 2018
Drivers suspected of being high who refuse police demands to take a drug test should lose their license for six months, the same penalty as alleged drunk drivers who decline a breathalyzer, a state commission on impaired driving said Friday.
Motorists who show signs of drug impairment should face an automatic license suspension if they refuse a blood test, a saliva test, or a 12-step evaluation that includes a urine test, the commission decided.
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say to [an allegedly impaired] driver, ‘If you want the privilege of driving in Massachusetts, you have to participate in a noninvasive test,’ ” said John Scheft, an attorney appointed by Attorney General Maura Healey.
The measure passed, 8-1, even though all commission members agreed the biological tests are imperfect because they only show past drug use, not current impairment.
“It’s about the opportunity to collect the evidence; it’s not about the significance of the evidence,” Scheft said. “That’ll be argued in court.”
The commission’s recommendation will go to state lawmakers, who will take up the issue when the Legislature convenes next month.
The vote on Friday came as officials seek to address a potential rise in stoned drivers as marijuana stores open across the state.
As if they were not there before.
Since Nov. 20, four pot shops have begun recreational sales in Massachusetts, with a fifth store opening Saturday. Other states that have legalized cannabis have struggled with the thorny legal and public safety issue of impaired driving, as the science of gauging marijuana impairment has not caught up to the increasing legality of the drug.
Walpole police Chief John Carmichael told other members of the commission that his department needs a tool to pressure drivers to take a test; more than half of suspected drugged drivers in his town refuse to cooperate, but other commission members pointed out that such tests could be unfair to cannabis users who legally used marijuana in the past and aren’t driving impaired. Tests that could detect marijuana impairment — akin to the way an alcohol breathalyzer detects drunkenness — are still three to five years away, officials said.
“We’re putting the cart before the horse,” said Matt Allen of the American Civil Liberties Union, the sole commission member who voted against the recommendation. “It would behoove the state, and be a good way to support the officers, if we were to do some studies that have better scientific methodologies.”
Turns out $cience is arbitrary, and only u$eful if it supports the agenda.
Researchers have found that cannabis can impede key driving skills, such as cognitive functioning, reaction times, and the ability to multitask. Mixing pot and alcohol can be especially dangerous.
Although scientists agree that blood-alcohol content is a valid measure of a person’s drunkenness, there is no consensus about what amount of marijuana in the blood indicates how stoned someone is.
Peter Elikann, the appointee of the Massachusetts Bar Association, initially expressed skepticism about pressuring drivers to take a problematic test, but in the end voted for the measure, saying it was just one piece of evidence.
“It doesn’t carry the day in a trial,” Elikann said. “It’s just one of the factors that would be considered that would be slightly helpful for the prosecution, but it doesn’t deliver the winning blow.”
Never mind the violation of your rights by the total $urveillance $tate. Not even the defen$e lawyer will speak up for you.
Law enforcement leaders on the commission agreed they envisioned such tests being part of a list of assessments that drivers face as police try to build a case for impairment.
Of 10 states that allow adult recreational marijuana use, only Massachusetts and Alaska lack laws that penalize drivers who refuse a drug test, according to research by the state Cannabis Control Commission. The states with such laws are Maine, Colorado, California, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, as well as Washington, D.C.
What about Oklahoma?
Mary Maguire, an appointee from the American Automobile Association, urged the commission to think about the message it was sending to drivers.
I'm so sick of being sent messages (in other words, being propagandized) by authority.
“There are many people who believe ‘I drive better high,’ and post online about it every day,” Maguire said. “There’s got to be consequences.”
Massachusetts’ highest court found last year that standardized field sobriety tests — such as standing on one leg, walking, and turning — weren’t enough to show whether someone was impaired by marijuana.
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Must have been the valet:
"Stack my car, please, my good robot" by Tim Logan Globe Staff December 08, 2018
Pull in off the street. Step out of your car. Let the robots take it from there.
That may become the routine for more drivers looking for a place to park in Boston, where two fully automated garages are in the works at new housing developments.
The Boulevard, a luxury condo building nearing completion on Broad Street downtown, will use a complex system of lifts, conveyors, and stackers to store vehicles in a 35-space underground garage. The 168-space garage at the 40 Rugg Road apartment complex in Allston — where work is just starting — will operate with a similar system.
When it’s time to leave either building, drivers will signal for their car through an app. Within minutes, it will be back at the entryway, pointed toward the street for an easy departure.
“It’d remind you of a vending machine,” said Jay Russo, vice president at The Michaels Organization, which is building the Allston project. “You dial up your number, and out comes the car.”
The technology behind automated garages has existed for years. They are popular in parts of Asia and Europe, New York City, and San Francisco, but the concept has been slower to catch on in Boston.
The trend toward automated garages is about saving space and money. With property prices at a premium in Boston, builders are trying to squeeze projects into ever-smaller, odd-shaped, footprints. Traditional garages, with their ramps, elevators, and ventilation shafts, aren’t suited for such complicated layouts, and take up too much space. Automated garages, which can stack cars just inches apart, reduce the square footage needed for parking by half to two-thirds, said Yair Goldberg, executive vice president at U-Tron, a New Jersey-based company that’s building the garage in Allston.
!!!!!!!!!!!
“When you eliminate all the turning radius and space to open doors and ramps and places for people to walk, you get a much more dense parking solution,” he said. “It makes the whole process more efficient.”
What is this scratch on the paint job?
U-Tron garages consist of an entryway the size of a two-car garage. Drivers pull in and leave their car, and a system of lifts and turntables then carries it to a space tucked onto a shelf or deck on one of several levels.
The high-tech systems are not necessarily cheaper to build. Most must be custom-designed and can cost anywhere from $20,000 to $100,000 per space, said Art Stadig, managing principal at the Boston office of parking consulting firm Walker Consultants. Most operators build in backup operating systems to prevent failure, and offer 24/7 support, though not on-site staffers.
It's a richer's paper.
A big advantage of the system is that it can eliminate the need to excavate for underground parking. Also, automated garages take up less above-ground space, meaning more square footage a developer can devote for housing or offices.
City rules require — and neighbors and residents often demand — parking in most larger residential buildings, but it’s expensive. At 40 Rugg Road — in an area of Allston where the water table is just 8 feet below ground level — squeezing in an above-ground garage without sacrificing a lot of leasable square footage was the difference between the project breaking even and turning a profit, Russo said.
“The parking dictates the project,” he said.
Automated garages have had their share of problems, though. Like all technology, occasional glitches can wreak havoc.
UH-OH!!!!
Three-quarters of the way through the promotion pamphlet, 'er, article they mention the problems!
In 2015, problems with the equipment at an automated garage in Miami resulted in cars smashed, furious residents, and huge lawsuits filed against the garage developer. In 2010, a worker died in an accident in an automated garage near Baltimore.
There also are tales of cars falling to their destruction, as well as long waits at peak times.
I'm sure everything will hum once they get the timing right.
Those episodes have made developers wary, Stadig said, and slowed adoption of automatic parking in the United States, but as the technology keeps improving, he said, and more people choose to move to cities — while still owning a car — the concept is gaining appeal.
OMFG!
“It’s really a function of what the marketplace demands,” Stadig said. “We’re building more complicated buildings on tighter sites, and I think architects and planners see this as a good solution for parking.”
They work best for residential buildings, Goldberg said, where even busy times of day aren’t as intense as they are at office buildings or shopping malls, meaning it’s less likely that drivers will spend a long time waiting for their cars.
As for residents, well, they’re getting used to the idea of trusting their car to the robots.
Soon they will be driving it, too!
At The Boulevard, it has required explaining to would-be buyers, said Ricardo Rodriguez, who is leading sales at the downtown condo building. He pitches the parking garage as one of many on-demand amenities the building features.
“It’s like having a valet, without a valet,” he said, and Jas Bhogal, who has built automated garages into two small condo buildings he has developed in Boston, said that based on his experience, it won’t take long for drivers to appreciate the convenience.
At least you won't have to tip 'em.
“It’s really effective,” he said of the parking systems. “You request your car and it’s there in 30 seconds. As more people get used to this, it’ll get even more popular.”
OMFG!
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Also see:
Breaking My Silence
Smoking' in the Boys Room!
You should really gamble rather than smoke, for the obviou$ rea$ons.
NEXT DAY UPDATE:
The smell lingered:
"Companies couldn’t fire workers for off-hours marijuana consumption under proposed law" by Dan Adams Globe Staff December 25, 2018
It’s legal for adults 21 years and older to smoke marijuana in Massachusetts. It’s also legal for employers to fire workers for testing positive for pot use — even though they aren’t impaired at work.
Seeking to bring workplace law into the era of recreational cannabis, state Senator Jason Lewis plans to introduce legislation next month that would prevent workers from losing their jobs solely for consuming marijuana on their own time.
If the new measure is enacted, pot would be treated more like alcohol: Employers would still be permitted to dump workers who show up high but could no longer police their private, legal consumption of the drug. An exception would allow companies that contract with the federal government to continue drug-testing and firing workers who consume marijuana if failing to do so would jeopardize their business.
“This is not intended to be a blanket protection for people to use cannabis whenever and wherever they like,” said Lewis, a Winchester Democrat. “But as long as they’re not impaired and it’s not impacting their work, employers should not be able to discriminate against them in hiring or promotion, and companies certainly should not be terminating people simply because they legally use marijuana on their own time.”
The exact language of the legislation is still being drafted, and its political prospects remain uncertain.
Critics of the status quo note that some tests can detect traces of cannabis weeks or even months after use. That puts workers at risk of losing their job for legal behavior long after the drug’s effects have worn off.
Lewis acknowledged that many firms have already relaxed or dropped stringent marijuana policies, given the tight labor market and legalization of cannabis in Massachusetts in 2016.
“I think most employers recognize where things stand in our society,” Lewis said. “They’re having trouble finding enough workers and they see that there are a lot of adults who choose to use cannabis. They know this is now a legal drug in Massachusetts, and that they should treat it in a similar way to alcohol.”
Still, Lewis said, he hoped the debate around his bill would prompt more local companies to rethink their strict “drug-free workplace” policies.
Christopher Geehern, executive vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, said the business group would not necessarily oppose the bill, depending on its details — but sounded skeptical.
Lewis’s bill, he said, must set a clear objective standard around when companies can sack marijuana-impaired workers who endanger other employees and present liability risks, but Geehern acknowledged that could be difficult — employers, like police, are hampered by the lack of a Breathalyzer-like test that can detect marijuana impairment, instead of just recent use.
“This is an incredibly complex, murky issue,” Geehern said.
They legalized it and now want to sift6 through the chafe.
According to attorney Amy Epstein Gluck, a partner at Washington, D.C., firm FisherBroyles who represents employers in marijuana and other issues, nine states have laws prohibiting employers from taking adverse actions against workers because of their legal use of marijuana for medical purposes. Other states, including New York and North Dakota, ban firings over any state-legal conduct outside of work — including smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, having consensual sex, and so on.
“I don’t have an issue with this legislation as long as employers can still test for marijuana when there’s a reasonable suspicion that the person is impaired while working,” Gluck said. “Nobody has an issue with the guy who comes home from work and has two scotches — unless he makes a critical error after having two scotches.”
Lewis said he drafted the bill in response to the case of Bernadette Coughlin, who was fired by food service firm Sodexo for flunking a drug test after she fell at work and broke two bones.
Coughlin — and her colleagues — insisted she had never been impaired at work and that the accident had nothing to do with her decision to occasionally inhale small quantities of marijuana vapor before bed. Coughlin is now in arbitration with her former employer, whom she accused of firing her simply to avoid paying a workers’ compensation claim.
“I think most people would agree Bernadette’s situation is very unfair,” said Lewis, who has tentatively dubbed the measure “Bernadette’s Bill.”
Lewis said he was confident it would gain the support of other legislators, perhaps winning passage in a bundle of other tweaks to the state’s cannabis law.
Coughlin, too, is confident, saying the reaction since she went public with her story earlier this year has been overwhelmingly positive. She plans to testify in favor of the legislation at the State House next year.
“I really would hope that whether they’re for or against or skeptical of marijuana legalization, [political leaders] would actually just listen to my story,” she added. “If they really took it in, they’d understand why I’m fighting to keep this from happening to anybody else.
“I’ve never been out of work this long in my life.”
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The message is clear: don't toke and drive.
I hate to be a grinch, but can you return the Christmas present?
FURTHER UPDATES:
"Somerville becomes first city in Mass. to restrict e-cigarette sales" By Michael Levenson Globe Staff December 25, 2018
Responding to an enormous increase in teens vaping nicotine, Somerville has become the first municipality in Massachusetts to restrict the sale of e-cigarettes, a step that could prompt other cities and towns to take similar action.
The local Board of Health voted this month to ban the sale of e-cigarettes and menthol cigarettes in stores that are open to youths, a move that will effectively pull the products from convenience store shelves.
Beginning April 1, 2019, sales of menthol and e-cigarettes will be allowed only in tobacco stores open to customers over age 21.
The regulation comes amid growing concern that e-cigarettes such as Juul, promoted as a way to help adults quit smoking traditional cigarettes, have instead launched an epidemic of teens addicted to inhaling nicotine from the sleek, electronic devices.....
Just wondering where they would be doing that.
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Also see:
For physician, cancer battle inspired cannabis company
It's in her DNA.
