Since Canada’s legalization of cannabis five years ago, researchers say the policy has had mixed results in terms of public health and justice reform.
Since Canada’s legalization of cannabis five years ago, researchers say the policy has had mixed results in terms of public health and justice reform.
We can’t ignore how it’s impacted traffic safety, though.
DUI, for example, seems to have skyrocketed since legalization. , while drunk driving didn’t budge.
https://tc.canada.ca/en/road-transportation/statistics-data/canadian-motor-vehicle-traffic-collision-statistics-2021
It’s a very specific measure in the data you published, and the capacity to get a statistically unbiased measure pre-legalization would be difficult due to availability and protocol around THC testing.
Although I WHOLEHEARTEDLY agree that it’s something that needs to be very carefully studied and monitored and legislated around… The answer to the question “are the roads more or less safe before or after legalization?” Is “They are equally safe within statistical margins”
From the context of road safely, this would mean that the roads are not safe, since we still have an overwhelming number of accidents, injuries, and fatalities. But I digress.
To the point of cannabis-related DUI, the link above suggests that impaired driving as a factor to accidents went down 7.7%, while the stats breaking down DUI (the link I posted) still suggests that cannabis-related DUI has gone up by quite a bit.
Would DUI numbers be even lower had cannabis not been legalized? Your guess is as good as mine.
A few rather annoying complications to gathering these stats over the last five years, however, involve COVID and underreporting.
For instance, did officers test people less often because of the risk of close contact during the 2020-2021 pandemic? We know that there were fewer drivers on the road, too, so the numbers can’t really be used as a reliable marker one way or the other. Fewer drivers = fewer accidents (but fewer accidents doesn’t mean fewer impaired drivers.
For Toronto at least, more people were caught driving under the influence year-over-year during the same time period.
We also know that DUI charges weren’t even being pursued due to backlogs.
To me, it seems that there may have been far more people driving under the influence than the stats lead us to believe.
The study I linked also suggests that many samples are obtained quite a while after an accident. So the actual level of drugs in someone’s system is also being reported much lower than it would have been at the time of the accident. Couple this with the above point, and things looked much safer than they actually were.
We can control for less people on the road by looking at stats per-million km driven. And again, we’re not seeing any meaningful movement.
And to the points around “maybe the true cases of people above the limit were EVEN HIGHER due to fear of testing around Covid” or “Maybe the actual THC content was EVEN HIGHER because of the time delay” they both actually drive to the same point:
If we’re seeing way more people with THC in their system maybe more than we even know, and at levels of concentration higher than we can even test… Then why aren’t we seeing significant increases in accidents or fatalities per million kms? We CLEARLY see these patterns w/ alcohol. Why not THC? Why the disconnect?
If anything, your arguments only make me think that THC levels that we’re seeing are safer than previously understood w.r.t operating a motor vehicle.
Keep in mind, I’m not suggesting relaxing them. I’m just pointing out that the “skyrocketing” THC DUIs aren’t materializing.
Or at least I’m not seeing them in the data in front of me
Also, full disclosure, I am not a smart man
If I’m missing a link or misreading something somewhere, let me know. I’m not married to my evaluation. I’m just trying to come to the same conclusion about safety as you and can’t seem to independently get there.
You’re asking good questions, and perhaps in time (and with more data), we can better account for what’s going on.
One thing to always keep in mind when you look at traffic incident stats is that certain things change over time.
For example, additional measures to make roads safer, better technology in vehicles, more effective emergency medicine, and new laws are constantly been put in place to reduce accidents (and fatalities).
Why do I mention this? Because we could very well have more DUI drivers on the road who may have THC levels high enough to be legitimately impaired, but these other factors are balancing out the risk of those impairments.
This could explain why we’re catching more DUI drivers, but seeing fewer DUI crashes or fatalities.
Or the simplest answer, thc doesn’t impair your motor skills or judgement to nearly the same level alcohol does.
Surely that depends on the dosage. I don’t know how drunk/stoned people are when they decide they are sober enough to drive. It is possible that alcohol makes that self-assessment particularly poor, but I haven’t seen any data yet. I’d love to learn more.