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.
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.
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.
