If Marijuana Causes Lots Of Crashes, Why Are They So Hard To Count?

Last year, during a congressional hearing on the threat posed by stoned drivers, a representative of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was asked how many crash fatalities are caused by marijuana each year. “That’s difficult to say,” replied Jeff Michael, NHTSA’s associate administrator for research and program development. “We don’t have a precise estimate.” The most he was willing to affirm was that the number is “probably not” zero.

Michael knows something that grandstanding politicians and anti-pot activists either do not understand or refuse to acknowledge: Although experiments show that marijuana impairs driving ability, the effects are not nearly as dramatic as those seen with alcohol, and measuring the real-world consequences has proven very difficult, as demonstrated by a landmark studythat NHTSA released last Friday. In “the first large-scale [crash risk] study in the United States to include drugs other than alcohol,” NHTSA found that, once the data were adjusted for...

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URL: 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2015/02/12/if-marijuana-causes-lots-of-crashes-why-are-they-so-hard-to-count/