Study Finds No Link Between Legalization & Pedestrian Traffic Fatalities

The annual carnage on America’s highways is a grim reality that has caused some to question the wisdom of cannabis legalization. However, the notion of a link between road fatalities and lifting the legal pressure on cannabis doesn’t stand up to the number-crunching. The latest to reach this conclusion is a new study published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, looking particularly at pedestrian fatalities. Carried out by a team from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, the study found that enactment of state-level policies legalizing for either medical or general adult use has not been associated with an increase in the prevalence of fatal motor-vehicle crashes involving pedestrians. According to a summary on NORML‘s website, investigators examined the association between the loosening of cannabis laws and fatal crash rates (both pedestrian-involved and total fatal crashes) during the years 1991 to 2018. This period spans the first moves toward medical marijuana laws and the embracing of general cannabis legalization by the three states the study focused on: Colorado, Oregon and Washington. Motor vehicle accident trends in those three states were compared to trends in five control states.  Relying on data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), maintained by the federal Transportation Department‘s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), researchers failed to identify any increase in fatal pedestrian-involved motor vehicle accidents that could be attributable to the enactment of more liberal cannabis laws. Indeed, they noted that two of the three states they examined, Washington and Oregon, actually saw decreases in fatal accidents following the…

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