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Abstract
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Colorado often comes up in discussions about legalizing cannabis, either as a model or a cautionary tale. According to Andrew Freedman, the state’s former marijuana czar, it’s both.
For better or worse, it is unclear how much has changed in the five years since Colorado legalized cannabis, said Freedman at the recent Recovery Capital Conference in Toronto. It’s too soon to know the long-term health impacts of the policy. However, there have been concerning increases in poisonings and fatal road accidents involving cannabis. And questions remain about heavy users and highly potent products.
There are also lessons for Canada, Freedman said, because Colorado’s legal pot regime is “more in line with the commercialization that Canada is attempting” than other states. These lessons are often lost, however, in the polarized debate about legalization.
Teens do perceive marijuana as less risky now, but that doesn’t appear to have affected their use, said Freedman. When it comes to teen use in the past 30 days, for example, “you will hear a lot of different statistics about what happened.” Some cite a 20% increase from 2011/12 to the beginning of legalization in 2013/14. Others cite a 20% decrease from 2012/13 to 2015/16. But overall, “we’ve seen almost statistically flatline use,” said Freedman. “We’ve remained somewhere between 9% and 11% for the past decade.”
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More troubling are the early trends in the percentage of drivers involved in fatal accidents who test positive for tetra-hydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive component of cannabis. That percentage has doubled since legalization, from 10% of all drivers involved in fatal crashes in 2013 to 20% in 2016. Freedman noted that the data aren’t conclusive. It doesn’t tell you if a driver was high, since THC can stay in the blood for up to a month, and it doesn’t tell you if marijuana caused the accident, he explained. Nevertheless, “I think we have a problem here.”
Keywords: Cannabis impaired driving
Language: en |