There has never been a right to harm others – and impaired driving most certainly harms others. The role of Parliament is to ensure safety for the community rather than endangering it, where a minority’s convenience for transport should never be placed above risking the life of another human.
Those behind the media campaign seeking new legislation easing controls on medical cannabis patients caught driving post-medicating have been egregiously misleading the public. A 7 News story shows a cannabis patient at the wheel of a driving simulator before and after taking his cannabis meds, and passing the test with almost flying colours. Yet the news segment ignores irrefutable scientific evidence that intoxication from orally consumed cannabis, due to the slowness of the body’s metabolism, does not peak until 1.5 – 4 hours after ingestion. What appears to be a sleight-of-hand media setup exploits the ignorance of the non-cannabis-using public thus enabling the very kind of intoxicated driving that costs human lives.
And human lives are indeed the denominator. The best quality driving statistics from the US experiment of legalising medical and recreational cannabis come from Colorado, which had a specific medical cannabis commercialisation phase causing an explosion from 5,000 to 41,000 patients in 2009 alone, and from Washington, the other US State to legalise recreational use in 2013 alongside Colorado. While Colorado saw cannabis use increase by 54% (see graphs below signature), the percentage of total road deaths from those drivers testing positive to cannabis more than doubled from 9% to 21%. Washington experienced the same over-representation of fatalities – for a 42% increase in cannabis use they had more than a doubling in the percentage of THC-involved vehicle fatalities.
There is a considerable science on why cannabis driving is causing these deaths. Even our own Sydney University asserts that patients still suffer impairment up to 5-7 hours after inhaling cannabis, and longer if ingested. Such conclusions come from tests done with minimal cannabis dosing (~10mg), in contrast to REMS pharmaceutical drug testing where conclusions are drawn from maximum dosing – internet chats by medical cannabis patients commonly discuss dosing of 40-500mg per day.
One crucial study found that cannabis users have entirely unrealistic self-awareness of their impairment, most thinking it subsided after 1.5 hours. Of critical importance is that US NHTSA data from 2022 on THC-involved crashes shows that peak times are during the morning commute and afternoon post-work commute, both when cannabis is more likely to be recently consumed by patients, a very different pattern to alcohol.
There are multiple factors that make medical cannabis and driving entirely unacceptable. Cannabis affects visual acuity and stereoacuity while driving (for near and far distances) making staying in a lane difficult. It also affects visual-spatial memory, complicating navigation. We know THC impaired drivers CANNOT multi-task – where having music, a friend in the passenger seat or talking hands-free on a cell phone goes well beyond simulator testing. It is causal in creating anxiety, as well as psychotic and mood disorders. Given that medication is most often used daily multiple times, many patients will become, over time, ultimately susceptible to the same chronic brain impairment as chronic cannabis users, all of which have serious negative impacts on driving:
- Memory impacted, thus performing badly with increased task complexity and demand
- Impairment of concept formation, planning and sequencing
- Significant attention and concentration deficits
- Slower information processing
- Chronic brain grey matter volume reduction in emotional and affective processing areas
Finally it is a verifiable fact that 62% of Australian prescriptions for medicinal cannabis in its first 5 years were for chronic pain, with another 8% for other pain-related conditions. Yet a 2022 review of 20 (gold standard) Random Control Trials of cannabis for chronic pain published in JAMA, one of the world’s top medical journals, found that cannabis worked no better than placebo. This means that more than half of Australia’s cannabis patients will be driving under the influence of cannabis AND opiates to actually control pain, both of which impair driving and where the Memory between drugs are at best additive and at worst multiply the dangers of both drugs while driving.
While Australia’s media conglomerates ensure the current science and statistics on cannabis driving will never reach or inform the public, Drug Free Australia seeks to have informed legislators.
Gary Christian, PRESIDENT
Drug Free Australia
+61 (0)422 163 141
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