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.
So the biggest negative about the legalization of cannabis is an increase in hospital admissions due to inadvertent edible use. And more children-young adults admitting they consumed cannabis. Though i wonder if relaxed views on its use prompted more under aged people to truthfully admit to its use then an actual increase in use.
There is need for adults to better monitor their drugs but other then that it seems to be a massive success.
but other then that it seems to be a massive success.
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.
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”
“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.
Yup, just imagine the gall it’d take to look at the US prison system full of drug arrests and think, “Well, it’s working alright for them.”
I am so elated that a safe hallucinagen is no longer restricted and causing social woes.
Cannabis isn’t a hallucinogen. You could call it a “recreational drug” when not used for medical purposes.
Cannabis is traditionally classified as a hallucinogen. For example, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) considers it as such.
