With marijuana legalization on the minds of many Canadians, several groups have come out with campaigns warning people that, legal or not, weed can have an impact on your ability to safely drive. Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec (SAAQ) is the latest, focusing on how an impaired reaction time can put you at risk when you’re behind the wheel.

Weed limits your reaction time, and while that may be funny when it takes a few seconds to react to a goal during a hockey game, it’s a lot less funny when you can’t react properly to traffic signals and stop signs, or questions from the firefighter attempting to pull you from your overturned vehicle.

To illustrate this, SAAQ and agency Lg2 put a ship captain in the back seat of a car driven by two guys clearly under the influence, playing on the idea of counting “battleships” (“bateau” in French) to keep track of the seconds. The ship captain counts the bateaus to show how long it takes our drivers to react to a red light, the realization that what they think is a red light is actually a stop sign, or that a sign was telling them the number of the highway they were on, not the speed limit.

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