USA TODAY/ CARS.COM: Columbia University researchers performing a toxicology examination of nearly 24,000 driving fatalities concluded that marijuana contributed to 12% of traffic deaths in 2010, tripled from a decade earlier…
[National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] and the National Institute on Drug Abuse are now in the final months of a three-year, half-million-dollar cooperative study to determine the impact of inhaled marijuana on driving performance. Tests observe participants who ingest a low dose of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, a high dose and a placebo to assess the effects on performance, decision-making, motor control, risk-taking behavior and divided-attention tasks.
The study is being performed using what NHTSA calls “the world’s most advanced driving simulator,” the University of Iowa’s National Advanced Driving Simulator, which was previously used to study the effects of alcohol on driving… (more)
EDITOR: To accurately evaluate the impact of marijuana taxation, regulation and control, it will be necessary not only to determine how many fatalities can be linked to increased use of marijuana but whether the number of fatalities per capita previously linked to alcohol has increased, remained the same, or dropped.
We intuit that it is safer for teenagers to have smoked pot than to have binged drink.
Scary headline, I’d like to know more of the facts.
Later in the story they write: “A National Highway Traffic Safety Administration study found that 4% of drivers were high during the day and more than 6% at night, and that nighttime figure more than doubled on weekends.”
If this is based on some kind of drug test, it raises doubts about the study. There is no drug test that can tell a person was high during the day or high at night. One of the great failures of the war on marijuana is that it wanted testing to be a wide net to catch as many people as possible. So tests were developed that caught people who used marijuana, not people who were “intoxicated” or “impaired” on marijuana.
The article uses is words like marijuana was “linked” and “contributed” to traffic deaths. Those vague words could merely mean someone who smoked marijuana a week ago was in a car crash. It could mean they were hit by a reckless driver. Scary sounding but meaningless.
If the simulator study they are doing is consistent with previous research it will show marijuana has very little impact on driving performance unless someone is also drinking alcohol. That is pretty much the conclusion of the other studies conducted regarding marijuana and driving. Obviously, driving is a complicated activity so drug use of any kind and driving is something to be avoided.
KZ