Healthy Living: When It Comes to Driving, Cannabis is in a Class by Itself

Government
funded drug warriors have been spreading misinformation and outright lies about
the dangers of cannabis and driving, conjuring up images of a blood bath on our
highways and children run down by cannabis-consuming drivers leaving a fast
food joint. Scrambling to find sky-is-falling scenarios to frighten the public,
driving under the influence of cannabis is one of their most successful
gambits, but a new study issued by one of the old “reefer madness” allies is
throwing cold water on this inflammatory rhetoric.

Using
the “most sophisticated driving simulator of its kind to mirror real-life
situations,” a June 2015 study by the National Institute of Drug Abuse
found that although alcohol “significantly increased lane
departures/minimum and maximum lateral acceleration; these measures were not
sensitive to cannabis.”

It
gets even better, as the study concluded that drivers under the influence of cannabis
“may attempt to drive more cautiously to compensate for impairing effects,
whereas alcohol-influenced drivers often underestimate their impairment and
take more risk.”

In
other words, drunk drivers tend to drive faster and cannabis-using drivers tend
to driver slower, leading noted drug policy expert and UCLA Professor of Public
Policy Mark Kleiman to
describe this phenomenon as “Cheech and Chong being arrested for doing 20 on
the freeway.”

Dr.
Eduardo Romano, the lead author of a 2014 study entitled Drugs
and Alcohol: Their relative crash risk got it right.
Published
in the Journal
for the Study of Drugs and Alcohol, the study found:

“For
both sober and drinking drivers, being positive for a drug was found to
increase the risk of being fatally injured. When the drug-positive variable was
separated into marijuana and other drugs, only the latter was found to
contribute significantly to crash risk. In all cases, the contribution of drugs
other than alcohol to crash risk was significantly lower than that produced by
alcohol.”

What
Dr. Romano, a senior research scientist at the Pacific Institute for Research
and Evaluation discovered was that once adjustments for demographics and the
presence of alcohol were made, cannabis, unlike
everything else, did not statistically increase the
risk of a crash.

In
an article for the New York Times,
Dr. Romano argued for a blood alcohol level (BAC) substantially lower than the
current 0.08 percent maintaining that it is not the best policy to be “focusing
too much on drugged driving, potentially diverting scarce resources from
curbing drunk driving.”

Science
and rationality have never been the hallmark of those of the prohibitionist
persuasion as evidenced by comments made in the San Diego
Union-Tribune by San Diego Deputy City Attorney Taylor Garrot.
Proclaiming that drugged driving is “just as dangerous and as deadly as it
would be for someone to get behind the wheel of a car after coming from the
bar,” Attorney Garrot diverted the time of city attorneys from prosecuting
alcohol DUI charges to prosecute drugged driving cases.

Promoting
such an unwavering defense in the face of scientific facts saying otherwise, it
should be no surprise to learn that it’s all about money. The San Diego City
Attorney’s office received a $263,000 grant to hire one prosecutor and one
investigator to concentrate on drugged driving cases. Throwing science and
fiduciary responsibility to the winds, the state Office of Traffic Safety renewed
the $263,000 grant for an additional year.

It’s
not that drugged driving cases make up a significant caseload for the City
Attorney’s office. They don’t. The minuscule number of drugged driving cases
compared to the galactic number of alcohol DUIs spotlights the insignificance
of this problem. Making mountains out of cannabis molehills serves the purpose
of allowing law enforcement to continue to peddle “the dangers of cannabis
impaired driving” in a frenzied attempt to sway public opinion against cannabis
legalization.

Instead
of prosecuting drugged driving cases, how much safer and healthier would the
citizens of San Diego be if the City attorney’s office utilized their
attorneys’ time and the $526,000 on alcohol DUIs? Dr. Romano can tell them—“I’m
not saying marijuana is safe, but to me it’s clear that lowering the BAC should
be our top priority. That policy would save more lives.”