Imagine if you had to tell a family that their child was never coming home again...because a driver had a few too many drinks and they were too lazy to get a taxi? How would you feel if it was your child? Your brother, your parent, your best friend? Now imagine that you're the one who had a few drinks and thought...Home isn't too far. I'll make it without getting busted. While on the back streets worrying if the booze bus will catch you, you hit someone. How do you live with that for the rest of your life?(First nation (not jurisdiction) to legalize cannabis use for citizens was Uruguay. This is the tip of the iceberg of issues that liberalization presents)
PMID: 35129240 DOI: 10.1111/add.15840
Abstract
Background and aim: In Uruguay, residents aged 18 and older seeking legal cannabis must register with the government and choose one of three supply mechanisms: self-cultivation, non-profit cannabis clubs, or pharmacies. This is the first paper to measure the association between type of legal cannabis supply mechanism and traffic crashes involving injuries.
Design: Ecological study using ordinary least squares regression to examine how department-level variation in registrations (overall and by type) is associated with traffic crashes involving injuries.
Setting: Uruguay.
Cases: 532 department-quarters.
Measurements: Quarterly cannabis registration counts at the department level and incident-level traffic crash data were obtained from government agencies. The analyses controlled for department-level economic and demographic characteristics and, as a robustness check, we included traffic violations involving alcohol for departments reporting this information. Department-level data on crashes, registrations, and alcohol violations were denominated by the number of residents aged 18 and older.
Findings: From 2013-2019, the average number of registrations at the department-quarter level per 10,000 residents aged 18 and older for self-cultivation, club membership, and pharmacy purchasing were 17.7 (standard deviaiton [sd]=16.8), 3.6 (sd=8.6), and 25.1 (sd=50.4), respectively. In our multivariate regression analyses, we did not find a statistically significant association between the total number of registrations and traffic crashes with injuries (β=-0.007; p=0.398; 95% confidence interval [CI]=-.023, .01). Analyses focused on the specific supply mechanisms found a consistent, positive, and statistically significant association between the number of individuals registered as self-cultivators and the number of traffic crashes with injuries (β=0.194; p=0.008; 95% CI=.058, .329). Associations for other supply mechanisms were inconsistent across the various model specifications.
Conclusions: In Uruguay, the number of people allowed to self-cultivate cannabis is positively associated with traffic crashes involving injuries. Individual-level analyses are needed to assess better the factors underlying this association.
