Your Feb. 13 news article linking fatal crashes to the April 20 pot “holiday” (Page B1) is given credence by no less than William S. Burroughs. As the designated father of the Beat Generation and the darling of the British Journal of Addiction for his apt descriptions of the effects of drugs on the body, he has his say on Page 19 of the 1995 Quality Paperback Club edition of his book “Junky.”

“One thing about weed. A man under the influence of weed is completely unfit to drive a car,” Burroughs writes. “Weed disturbs your sense of time and consequently your sense of spatial relations. Once, in New Orleans, I had to pull over to the side of a road and wait until the weed wore off. I could not tell how far away anything was or when to turn or put on the brakes for an intersection.”

The upside, for a culture determined to legalize induced “giggles” as a source of tax revenue, is that pot will be a boom for the boys in blue writing those traffic tickets.

Robert Denbow

Saco


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