“Just watching the lifeless body of your beloved child, it’s so unnatural,” Henry Rivera said through tears on the steps in the Capitol rotunda in Albany, New York, last week.
Rivera, whose 18-year-old son was killed in 2007 by a driver high on cocaine, was testifying before the legislature about the need to close a loophole in New York state law. Currently, in order to be prosecuted for driving while under the influence of drugs, the specific drug needs to be listed in state law. But with new drugs, such as the veterinary tranquilizer known as “tranq,” proliferating more quickly, the law is not keeping up. The proposed legislation supported by the relatives of victims, like the Riveras, would expand the definition of a drug to include any substance or combination of substances that impairs someone’s physical or mental abilities.
The problem of driving while impaired is much bigger than this common-sense legal change, though. Indeed, the evidence suggests that our society is actually going backward on this issue. Driving while under the influence was a fairly common occurrence in the middle of the 20th century. Watch an episode of “Mad Men” if you want some examples. But drunk driving fell off significantly in the 1980s and 1990s, thanks to public education campaigns from Mothers Against Drunk Driving and stricter state laws.
Since the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) began recording alcohol-related statistics in 1982, the number of persons under 21 killed in drunk driving crashes decreased 74% from the record high — from 5,215 in 1982 to 1,345 in 2022. This was true even as our population was expanding. But drunk driving incidents have been climbing. That 2022 number represents a 49% increase from a record low of 904 deaths in 2019.
The number of drug-related accidents has been more difficult to categorize, in part because of the explosion in cannabis use and the lack of a uniform way to measure whether someone with cannabis in their system is impaired. But we know that cannabis-related crashes have grown. According to a study conducted at the University of Ottawa, marijuana-related traffic accidents that required a visit to the emergency room rose 475% between 2010 and 2021.
While it is probably lower than the number of incidents involving alcohol, cannabis is definitely climbing as a percentage, too. A 2024 study by University of California, Davis researchers of 490 drivers injured in motor vehicle crashes in the previous year found that alcohol was present in 10% of the drivers and cannabis was detected in 9% of them. This is hardly surprising given that daily cannabis use now outpaces daily alcohol use in the U.S.
As far back as 2019, before cannabis use became as widespread as it is today, a survey by AAA found that an estimated 14.8 million drivers said that they have operated a vehicle within an hour of using marijuana. We may not have a good test yet for figuring out how to distinguish between a driver who is impaired by cannabis and one who has it in his or her system from a while ago. But it is reasonable to assume that using pot an hour before driving is not a great idea. Nevertheless, a survey of cannabis users in eight states found that “About 1 in 5 (19.0%) thought their driving was worse after use, while others viewed their driving as the same (46.9%), a little better (14.7%), or much better (19.4%).”
Also concerning is that while many observers have speculated that cannabis might replace alcohol in certain contexts, a recent study from Boston University found that people who died in crashes involving cannabis had 50% greater odds of having alcohol in their system as well.
Perhaps it is not surprising that we have to learn the same lessons over and over again. When a problem seems to be less common, people don’t think about it and they don’t remember how it was solved in the first place. (See also measles outbreaks.)
“We’re kind of painting the plane as we fly it when it comes to cannabis liberalization,” Jake Nelson, the director of traffic safety advocacy and research at AAA, told The New York Times recently. “Public health and safety has been more of an afterthought.”
Fixing this problem will require not only a rethinking of the legalization efforts across the country. It will also require a renewed public messaging campaign. In preparation for this, MADD rebranded last year, removing the trademark martini glass from its logo and replacing it with a warning red triangle. Now the organization has committed itself to ending “impaired” driving. Let’s hope they can be as successful this time around.