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Analysis by Richard Cowan

Past Cannabis Use Not Associated With Injury Severity, Study Says

One of the perversities of cannabis prohibition is that the prohibitionist police state has repeatedly found ways to add to their power – and its burden on the people – by devising new excuses for ancillary penalties that often do not appear directly in the criminal law. Cannabis users can lose their college loans, custody of their children, their drivers licenses and their jobs, while the prohibitionists say. “No one goes to prison for marijuana possession.”   Urine testing drivers is demonstrably pointless as far as public safety is concerned, but it is another source of power for its own sake.)

The Hague, The Netherlands:  The use of cannabis and other psychoactive substances is not associated with an increase in the severity of car-crash related injury, according to data published in the current issue of the journal Traffic Injury Prevention.   Investigators at the Netherlands Forensic Institute and Utrecht University assessed the relationship between substance use and injury severity in a group of crash-involved drivers admitted to a regional trauma center.

Authors determined that drivers who tested positive for the presence of drugs or alcohol in their blood or drug metabolites in their urine were no more likely to suffer from more severe injuries than were drivers who tested negative for the presence of psychoactive substances.   Authors wrote: “There is much evidence that driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs of abuse is related to an increased accident risk. 

A remaining question is whether the use of psychoactive substances is also related to clinically more sever accidents.”  They concluded, “[W]e found no relation between the use of psychoactive substances (alcohol, drugs) and the severity of injury.  … More research is needed and blood sampling of all crash-involved drivers [to more accurately determine recent substance use] is recommended to confirm the[se] results and to [better] study the relation between the different classes of drugs and injury severity.”

            Diigo