Long Beach, California is developing ways to teach local residents how to responsibly consume cannabis without getting behind the wheel. Given that cannabis sales in Long Beach contributed more tax revenue in 2022 than oil, it’s a big facet of the city and leaders hope to keep cannabis use safer. 

The City of Long Beach announced that its Department of Health and Human Services was awarded a $285,000 grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to educate locals about responsible cannabis use and its goal to reduce cannabis-impaired driving related collisions.

“This grant fuels the City’s ongoing effort to keep everyone on our roadways safe,” said Mayor Rex Richardson. “It’s important that people get informed. This means, the public should know that driving under the influence includes cannabis, illegal substances, and even some medications.”

The Health Department’s GreenlightLB Program will utilize grant funds to support activities that aim to educate community members about the dangers of driving while impaired by cannabis and drugs, as well as promote safer choices, including safe driving behaviors. The funding will be allocated to support several activities between Oct. 1, 2023, and Sept. 30, 2024, including the following:

• DUI-Drug prevention workshops for high school and college age students to address the risks of driving while impaired and promote the use of transportation alternatives.
• Community partnerships to advance health equity through bilingual and bicultural workshops on drug-impaired traffic safety.
• E-scooter/E-Bike campaign to remind users that riding under the influence is both unsafe and against the law.
• Peer-to-peer youth program to empower youth to actively promote traffic safety.
• Collaboration with dispensaries to educate consumers about safe and responsible cannabis use and the risks of cannabis-impaired driving.
• Enhanced drug-impaired driving awareness through print and digital media resources and coordination of Long Beach Safe Streets Awareness Week.
• Pop-up events that promote the importance of safe and responsible driving.

“Our top priority is the safety of our community,” said Acting Health Department Director Alison King. “The efforts funded by OTS allow for evidence-based programs to increase awareness and help everyone make informed decisions and eliminate drug-impaired driving in Long Beach.”

What Long Beach is Doing to Promote Safety

The city has been busy with initiatives to promote safety. Last year, the program reached 2,000 community members via the following methods:

• 35 drug-impaired driving community presentations and youth-focused workshops.
• 16 educational outreach tables and pop-ups to promote safer driving.
• The graduation of 14 students from across five Long Beach schools for the Safe Streets Ambassador program.
• Co-hosting the fourth annual Long Beach Safe Streets Awareness week.
• Conducting the annual city-wide cannabis and health assessment.

“Getting in a vehicle remains one of the most dangerous things we do,” said California Office of Traffic Safety Director Barbara Rooney. “We must continue to work with our partners to shift that realization and make traveling on our roads safer.”

It marks the seventh year the city’s Health Department has received an OTS grant for these purposes. The activities funded by this grant are in line with the Health Department’s plan to further develop a safe approach to responsible cannabis use. GreenlightLB’s program activities are also designed to advance goals identified in the City’s Safe Streets Action Plan to eliminate traffic-related deaths and serious injuries by 2026.  

Long Beach Lowers Taxes

Last April, the city announced it would lower cannabis tax rates in an effort to generate more revenue.

The Signal Tribune reported that after the Long Beach City Council unanimously approved the tax rate change, the Office of Cannabis Oversight began to establish a plan to lower taxes for recreational and medical cannabis use. The lower tax rates will be established as part of the city’s 2024 annual budget. 

“We should be aiming to create a positive feedback loop: reduce the tax burden on local operators, allow them to be competitive and expand their businesses, while rewarding those high road employers and operators who make investments back into our community, all while nurturing a new revenue source for the city,” said Councilmember Joni Ricks-Oddie.

Long Beach is home to 32 retail cannabis stores and 37 cultivators. Since recreational cannabis use became legal in California in 2016, the tax rate in Long Beach was set at 8% for adult-use sales, 6% for medical-use sales, 1% for lab testing receipts, as well as $13.70 per square foot of canopy under cultivation. There is also a 10.25% general sales tax in California. 

Lowering cannabis tax rates is expected to cause an increase in legal cannabis sales, designed to attract people avoiding taxes.

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The Minnesota Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) announced its pilot project to launch a cannabis saliva test for determining impairment in drivers.

According to OTS Director Mike Hanson, the test is being designed to determine recent impairment. “We’re not looking to find somebody who used 10 days or 14 days ago. We’re looking for somebody who used within the last couple of hours,” Hanson explained.

The saliva test would screen for a total of six substances, such as cannabis and opioids, using both the SoToxa Mobile Test System and Dräger DrugTest 5000. Both devices have already previously been tested in other states.

The state’s 320 Drug Recognition Evaluators (DREs), who have been trained to recognize signs of impairment due to substances other than alcohol, will be given saliva devices for the program. A majority of the DREs are local law enforcement officers, but one-third are state troopers. “We’re going to get a good sampling not only in metro areas, but also in the greater Minnesota areas that will give us an idea of how prevalent drug impaired driving is on our roads,” Hanson continued.

In practice, if an officer comes across a driver who appears to be impaired, they will ask them to perform field sobriety tests, followed by swabbing their mouth, if they consent. “That swab is then inserted into a cartridge, and that cartridge then is inserted into the instrument. Roughly five minutes later, you will get your result,” Hanson said. A news report from Fox 9 explained that individuals won’t be arrested or have their licenses revoked while participating.

The pilot program will help the department gather data by using participants who provide voluntary saliva samples. The goal is to determine the presence of one of the six substances, not the varying levels of a substance within a person’s body. “If you have Delta 9 in your system, that tells the officer [the driver] used recently, and that very likely is the cause of their impairment, or part of their impairment if they’re using other things in in conjunction with that cannabis,” Hanson said.

Data shows that between 2013-2017, there were 8,069 incidents involving intoxicated drivers, and between 2018-2022, that number increased to 15,810.

The goal is that OTS will gather data and submit it to the Minnesota Legislature in fall 2024, with the goal of asking lawmakers to update state law to allow the devices to be used by law enforcement to arrest impaired drivers.

In Michigan in 2017, a similar Oral Fluid Roadside Analysis Pilot Program was launched with the use of a device called an Alere DDS2, which tests for amphetamine, benzodiazepines, cannabis, cocaine, methamphetamine and opiates. Between 2019-2020, Phase II of the program was launched. Similar roadside saliva tests have been implemented in Alabama and Kansas as well.

Following adult-use cannabis legalization in Canada in 2018, the country altered its laws to permit the use of roadside saliva drug tests with the Dräger DrugTest 5000. In 2019, the Canadian government approved the SoToxa Mobile Test System for use by law enforcement. 

The Victorian Parliament in Australia recently approved a bill to address and implement a medical cannabis driving trial in October 2023 as well. “This bill will allow us to deliver a world-leading research trial into medical cannabis and driving, enhancing our understanding of how cannabis affects driving behavior and informing future reform,” said road safety minister Melissa Horne.

Victoria was the first Australian province to legalize medical cannabis six years ago. “The reality is patients continue to wait. Medicinal cannabis has been prescribed since 2016, that’s a long time for patients to have to wait for a resolution,” said Australia MP Rachel Payne. “A medicinal cannabis patient should be treated like any other patient who is prescribed medicine by a doctor who also provides appropriate advice about when that patient is safe to drive.”

However, there are concerns regarding the efficacy of these roadside drug tests. In 2019, a Vancouver-based attorney found that the Dräger DrugTest 5000 was not a reliable way to determine impairment, claiming that it was producing false positives for people who had only consumed CBD. “We found there was a retention period of half an hour. It was still found in the mouth even though there were no lingering effects in the body,” said attorney Kyla Lee.

Other complaints included that the device wasn’t performing properly in cold weather. “We need to put more effort in this country into finding a device that can tell the difference between something that’s impairing a person and something that’s merely present in their system,” Lee explained.

In September of this year, an article published on the American Council on Science and Health website explained how these drug tests are still not up to par. In a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, determined that roadside saliva tests in theory are useful, but not accurate. “One court concluded that ‘there is as yet no scientific agreement on whether, and, if so, to what extent, these types of tests are indicative of marijuana intoxication,’” researchers wrote.

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In a new report by Quartz Advisor, data shows that since 2016, traffic fatalities fell in four states that legalized adult-use cannabis, with a slight increase of fatalities in five states that have not legalized cannabis. The report showed some anomalies, however, and there was a slight increase of traffic fatalities across the board during 2020 and 2021, the pandemic years.

Quartz Advisor’s report, “Legalizing Marijuana Hasn’t Made Roads Less Safe,” was published on Oct. 24.

Out of the report, three highlights were presented.

• In California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada—four states that fully legalized marijuana in 2016—traffic fatalities declined or remained the same in the three years that followed, compared to a slight increase in states where it remained illegal.
• A comprehensive study of traffic data in the U.S. and Canada failed to find a statistically significant change in accidents and fatalities after legalization.
• Alcohol, which remains fully legal in all 50 states and D.C., is a factor in nearly a third of all automotive fatalities.

For better data, Quartz utilized traffic fatality results from the National Safety Council (NSC), which they believe provided more accurate results.

“For clarity and consistency, we chose four states—California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada—that fully legalized marijuana in 2016 to study vehicle death rate trends,” Senior Automotive Journalist David Straughan wrote in the report summary. “We used deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles as our primary metric, sourced from the National Safety Council (NSC). Our team examined individual vehicle death rates and aggregated fatality rates in these four states during the years following 2016 and compared them to the U.S. national average. We also compared these numbers with those of Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming—five states that have not legalized marijuana.”

While the vehicle death rate increased across the board when you include the pandemic years, the rate of fatalities was “slightly increased” in states that didn’t legalize adult-use cannabis.

“Among the states that legalized marijuana in 2016, the vehicle death rate increased by 6.0% between 2016 and 2021. While this is an increase, it is slightly less of an increase than the national average, which saw a 6.2% increase in the traffic fatality rate over the same period. The vehicle death rate dropped by an average of 0.7% in the five states that have not legalized cannabis during this period.

With a more complex and nuanced picture, Quartz Advisor researchers removed 2020 and 2021 traffic fatality data changes to see what would happen.

“In many ways, 2020 and 2021 were anomalies, and this remains true in the case of vehicular accident trends. After decades of declining accident rates in the U.S., traffic fatalities picked up in 2020 and stayed high through 2021. The U.S. as a whole saw traffic fatality rates spike 18.9% from 2019 to 2021. States that legalized marijuana in 2016 saw a similar increase of 19.9%. States that have not legalized—and are notably more rural than ones that did—saw the vehicular death rate fall 2.3% over that period.”

A study published in The American Journal of Addictions (AJA) found that cannabis impacts our ability to drive, and advised against it, yet it showed some interesting details. 

“Surprisingly, given the alarming results of cognitive studies, most marijuana-intoxicated drivers show only modest impairments on actual road tests,” it reads. The report adds, “Experienced smokers who drive on a set course show almost no functional impairment under the influence of marijuana.”

Americans Are Driving Stoned

Millions of Americans are getting high, and then getting behind the wheel, High Times reported in December 2019.

In a report of findings detailed in 2019 by researchers associated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which showed that 12 million American adults said that they had driven under the influence of marijuana in 2018. 

The report, “Driving Under the Influence of Marijuana and Illicit Drugs Among Persons Aged ≥16 Years — United States, 2018” was published on Dec. 20, 2019.

The CDC said that an estimated 10,511 alcohol-impaired driving deaths occurred in 2018. 

The findings on driving under the influence of pot dovetail with a report released by American Auto Association (AAA)  a few years ago. 

The AAA report found that almost 70% of Americans believe it is unlikely for a driver to get busted by the cops while high on marijuana. AAA also offered up what it called another “alarming finding” in its research: roughly 14.8 million drivers have gotten behind the wheel within an hour of using pot in the last 30 days.

In the next two years following that report, traffic fatalities surged everywhere thanks to the effects of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown.

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The Victorian parliament has passed new laws that will allow medical cannabis users to get behind the wheel on a closed road. These new laws are part of a trial that will look into the impact marijuana has on a person’s driving ability.

In 2016, Victoria was the first Australian state to legalize medical cannabis. However, individuals part of this program can still face legal consequences if they’re found to have tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in their system while driving.

The difficulty with this is THC can remain in a person’s system long after the “high” has worn out. That said, you can find yourself with an offense even if you haven’t consumed it for a few days. As of this time, Tasmania is the only state that allows for a medical defense if THC is found in a driver’s body fluids.

This is the primary importance of Victoria’s trial – to determine what’s a safe level of THC to be driving with. Many Victorian medical marijuana users have raised concerns about the risk of losing their license or being fined. The Victoria parliament had initially addressed these concerns in 2021, but efforts were delayed due to COVID-19. 

The government plans to commission an independent research organization (currently undetermined) which will be supported by the Department of Transport and Planning. And they’ve made sure to note that this research will take place in a controlled-driving environment that’s separated from public roads.

Such efforts couldn’t come at a better time. According to road safety minister, Melissa Horne, the number of medical marijuana patients in Victoria has increased more than 700% over the last 2 years.

The Importance of Understanding Cannabis’s Effects on Drivers

While Victoria can recognize the many benefits medical cannabis provides to residents, there remain “significant gaps” in their understanding of THC. More specifically, how it affects drivers and what the risk is for road safety.

“This bill will allow us to deliver a world-leading research trial into medical cannabis and driving, enhancing our understanding of how cannabis affects driving behaviour and informing future reform,” Horne said.

There have been other efforts for reforms to road laws and medical marijuana. For example, upper house MPs Rachel Payne and David Ettershank, of the Legalise Cannabis party, have been championing for it to no longer be an offense if a driver who has detectable levels of THC in bodily fluid is unimpaired. Both Payne and Ettershank support the current trial but are concerned it will take too long.

“The reality is patients continue to wait,” Payne said. “Medicinal cannabis has been prescribed since 2016, that’s a long time for patients to have to wait for a resolution.”

She continued: “A medicinal cannabis patient should be treated like any other patient who is prescribed medicine by a doctor who also provides appropriate advice about when that patient is safe to drive.”

Beyond this information, it would also help to have a way of testing impairment. Since law enforcement can’t resort to surefire results as seen with a blood-alcohol test, it would also benefit Victoria to determine a proper physical test to decide on a driver’s state of intoxication.

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A New Jersey government official wants to keep track of your entire relationship with cannabis in an effort to tackle stoned driving, the New Jersey Monitor reports. Assemblywoman Shanique Speight (D) wants to create a division tasked with compiling data, such as information on any arrests made for driving under the influence where cannabis is present, through use or possession, in addition to other marijuana-related arrests, dismissals, convictions, cannabis seized, and even adjudications of cannabis charges.

The reality of the dangers of driving with cannabis in one’s system is hotly debated. U.S. lawmakers are scurrying to find a way to solve the issue, whether they’re getting people stoned (and even giving them munchies) to research high driving or working on tech to scan your eyeballs, they really, really want to find a way to identify (and prosecute) anyone driving under the influence of cannabis. Never mind the fact that weed legalization in Canada is not linked to an increase in car crashes. 

Speight was inspired to tackle the problem in her home state after visiting Colorado, the first state to have legal recreational weed, in the summer of 2022 and observing how the state deals with motorists driving under the influence of cannabis. “I don’t know if they have the correct guidance on how to charge without overstepping,” Speight said. Colorado has an office under the state’s criminal justice division that monitors and logs any cannabis offenses, yet New Jersey has no similar centralized database. “When I saw what they were doing over there, I started thinking about how that would be good for our state,” she said. “I like the fact that they have a certain division handling and keeping track of these cases.”

So, New Jersey residents, you can get mad at Colorado for inspiring your state to step up its vigor regarding cannabis-related driving arrests. Speight aims to create the division to help the police know under what circumstances they can arrest someone. This means the state government will be collecting more information about its citizens, which will be presented annually to the governor and Legislature, and include any recommendations for improvements.

The bill, introduced earlier this month (sponsored by Sen. Vin Gopal (D) in the Senate), would additionally create a “public awareness campaign” about cannabis and driving. It’s currently referred to both chambers’ law and public safety committees.

In New Jersey, recreational cannabis is legal for adults 21 and over. You can possess up to six ounces. If you are caught with more than that, the cops can’t arrest you but can issue a summons. Additionally, they can’t search your car without a warrant just because they think they smell weed smoke. If a cop does overreach and investigate cannabis use for anyone under 21, they can be charged with deprivation of civil rights for knowingly violating the cannabis law’s requirements. They then face up to five years in prison and a $15,000 fine. 

As a result, Speight says that she’s “troubled” by incidents where New Jersey police don’t know what to do. Many officers take a more hands-off approach to avoid getting in trouble due to the current law, and the proposed data collection-based division aims to tackle this. While the existing rules sound favorable to anyone who enjoys pot, it’s confusing police, who, without a current, accurate cannabis version of the breathalyzer, have a hard time figuring out if someone is driving stoned or not. 

“All of this gets complicated to me, but I don’t think it should be ignored. It should be addressed,” Speight adds, noting she hopes to work with both cannabis advocates and law enforcement on the bill.

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Neither the legalization of adult-use cannabis nor the uptick in retail sales is correlated with an increase in car accidents, NORML reports. The data comes from a study published earlier this month in the Drug and Alcohol Review.

Canadian scientists looked at the number of traffic accidents in Toronto both in the years prior to and then directly after the city legalized adult-use cannabis. 

According to their report: “[N]either the CCA [Canadian Cannabis Act] nor the NCS [number of cannabis stores per capita] is associated with concomitant changes in (traffic safety) outcomes. … During the first year of the CRUL’s [cannabis recreational use laws] implementation in Toronto, no significant changes in crashes, number of road victims and KSI [all road users killed or severely injured] were observed.”

In the U.S., the risk of increased car crashes due to stoned driving is often cited as a reason not to legalize adult-use cannabis. Throughout the years, various studies have reported conflicting information and led to different results depending on whom you ask and what their position on cannabis is. For example, a 2021 U.S. study suggested that auto accident rates rose in California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington, where recreational cannabis use and retail sales are legal, as Newsweek reported. However, if you read the entire article, you notice that at the end, it mentions that the study in question, which used information from injured drivers in emergency rooms in Denver, Colorado; Portland, Oregon; and Sacramento, California, only saw an increase in car accidents when cannabis was paired with alcohol. 

According to the CDC, in 2020, 11,654 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes involving alcohol-impaired drivers, which accounted for 30% of all traffic-related deaths in the U.S. The annual estimated cost of car crash deaths involving alcohol-impaired drivers totaled about $123.3 billion in 2020, including the estimate for lives lost and medical bills. Not only is alcohol legal, but it’s not beholden to the same insane tax laws as cannabis, which, by strangling the legal market, only seem to allow the black market to flourish. The cannabis industry paid over $1.8 billion in additional taxes in 2022 alone. 

The findings of the Toronto Drug and Alcohol Review study are consistent with other Canadian research. For instance, a 2021 study in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence “found no evidence that the implementation of the Cannabis Act [which legalized adult-use in Canada] was associated with significant changes in post-legalization patterns of all drivers’ traffic-injury ED [emergency department] visits or, more specifically, youth-driver traffic-injury ED presentations.” As NORML points out, another study published earlier this year similarly concluded, “Overall, there is no clear evidence that RCL [recreational cannabis laws] had any effect on rates of ED visits and hospitalizations for either motor vehicle or pedestrian/cyclist injury across Canada.”

However, in the U.S., insights into the correlation between cannabis legalization and traffic accidents tend to bend to meet Republicans’ regressive and scientifically unsound views. As Benzinga reports, regarding a 2023 bill meant to curb Connecticut’s legal market, State Senator Paul Cicarella (R), a ranking member of the Public Safety and Security Committee, told NBC Connecticut’s Mike Hydeck: “There’s not really a test that can determine when somebody is under the influence of the marijuana,” he said, adding that that the “false positive rate and false negative rate is so high that again, that might be a challenge to be admissible in court as well.” 

The race is indeed on to create a THC breathalyzer. However, anti-cannabis lawmakers fail to grasp that people are already using cannabis, whether it’s legal or not. While cannabis is considered a generally safe substance, like any mind-altering drug, of course, one should consider safety measures such as driving and always using it responsibly. However, if the U.S. truly wants to focus on safety, its priority should be correcting tax laws and legalization on a Federal level because unless that happens, there won’t be a legal market to study. 

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Driving while stoned.

It has become one of the more vexing challenges for law enforcement in the era of legalization, with cops across the country struggling to square their jurisdiction’s new cannabis laws with their mandate to keep the roads safe. 

The Washington Post detailed how a police department in Maryland, where voters approved a measure legalizing recreational pot last year, are preparing for a potential spike in impaired drivers on their roads.

According to the Washington Post, the Montgomery County, Maryland Police Department holds a gathering two to three times per year.

“Montgomery County brings in marijuana smokers — literally goes to pick them up in police cars — and walks them to the tent outside its training academy so they can get stoned. Bags of Cheetos, bottles of water and plenty of pizza are on the house,” the report said. “Participants are then used as test subjects for officers trying to determine whether someone is too high to drive. That’s not easy. Unlike people who drive drunk, and whose impairment can be quantified by breathalyzers and blood-alcohol tests, it’s more difficult to discern with pot.”

The exercise, according to the Post, is “increasingly being held at police agencies nationwide.”

As states and cities have lined up to reform their existing cannabis laws and end the prohibition on pot, law enforcement in those jurisdictions have often had to play catch-up. 

In Virginia, which became the first state in the southern United States to legalize recreational cannabis in 2021, officials began exploring options last year to crack down on stoned driving. 

“Virginia officials said the ‘oral fluid tests’ under consideration to detect marijuana intoxication are similar to a ‘preliminary breath test’ — a roadside test for alcohol. The test results, while not admissible in court, can help determine when the cannabis was consumed, and can be combined with other factors to get probable cause for extensive blood testing,” the Virginian-Pilot reported in December.

The newspaper also said that officials were considering “changing state law to allow roadside screening devices in which officers and deputies can have a driver swab his or her cheek in order to gather saliva to test for marijuana and other drugs.”

In New York, which legalized recreational cannabis for adults in 2021, officials were said to be “scrambling” last fall as they raced to develop a mechanism to determine whether or not someone is too stoned to drive.

“Identifying drivers impaired by cannabis use is of critical importance…..However, unlike alcohol, there are currently no evidence-based methods to detect cannabis-impaired driving,” read a memo from New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office.

The stoned driving simulations in Montgomery County, Maryland might be the most novel effort yet. 

The Washington Post’s story provided an account of a “recent session, held on a Thursday night in January, [that] lasted nearly four hours.”

“Participants engaged in a 30-minute ‘consumption session,’ followed by impairment evaluations inside the building, and repeated the cycle. During the second consumption session, officers asked if any volunteers wanted to add alcohol to the mix.

‘Who wants a Bud Light?’ asked Lt. John O’Brien, leaning over a cooler. Then he grabbed a large bottle of booze: ‘Captain Morgan?’…None of the subjects drive home. They return via the cops who brought them. All hold medical-use cards and are reimbursed for the product they ingest.”

The Post said that “Montgomery has been a leader in the cannabis labs program, also called green labs, which experts say appears to be operating in nearly 10 states.”

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A lawmaker in Ohio has introduced a bill that would help marijuana users in the state avoid a costly impaired driving charge. 

News 5 Cleveland reports that the legislation, introduced by a Republican state senator, “would change the standards of the Operating a Vehicle Under the Influence (OVI) law,” and “help update Ohio laws due to the prevalence of medical marijuana licenses.”

The station said that the bill would help drivers avoid “facing charges for driving with THC in their system as long as they can prove they weren’t impaired.”

“Under the current statute for an OVI, it’s testing whether or not it’s in your system. Now that we have legalized it for medical purposes, I think we need to update the statute to where we’re looking at whether or not somebody is impaired,” GOP state Sen. Nathan Manning told News 5 Cleveland. 

“Marijuana in general is a lot different than alcohol, alcohol is lot more black and white,” he added.

Ohio lawmakers passed a bill legalizing medical cannabis in 2016, and sales began in the Buckeye State three years later. 

According to the Ohio Medical Marijuana Control Program, there are more than 330,000 registered medical cannabis patients in the state. The state announced last year that its medical cannabis program had generated nearly $725 million in sales since 2019.

Ohio patients with the following qualifying conditions are eligible for medical cannabis treatment under the state’s law: AIDS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, cachexia, cancer, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy or another seizure disorder, fibromyalgia, glaucoma, hepatitis C, Huntington’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis, pain that is either chronic and severe or intractable, Parkinson’s disease, positive status for HIV, post-traumatic stress disorder, sickle cell anemia, Spasticity, spinal cord disease or injury, terminal illness, Tourette syndrome, traumatic brain injury and ulcerative colitis.

Advocates say the medical cannabis law, and the ubiquity of the treatment statewide, has created a dilemma for law enforcement and patients alike.

“In an OVI, we are charged with being medicated on stuff you bought legally from a dispensary or smoke shop,” Ally Reaves with Midwest CannaWomen told News 5 Cleveland. “That’s not fair.”

The bill introduced by Manning “would allow drivers to have up to 25 nanograms of THC per milliliter in their urine instead of the current 10,” and “would raise the concentration from two to five nanograms of THC per milliliter” for blood, according to the station.

Shifting those standards is crucial, given how long THC can remain in a person’s system. 

“Our policemen and women that are enforcing these traffic laws are doing a great job and very often are not charging anybody unless they are showing signs of impairment, whether that’s through their field sobriety tests or their own observations,” Manning told News 5 Cleveland. “But there are situations where somebody is arrested and has consumed marijuana in the previous few days and technically would be above that ‘per se’ level, even though there’s no impairment whatsoever.”

“The consensus of the scientific community is clear that there is no acceptable limit of marijuana that automatically makes a person impaired,” Manning added. “Impairment must be considered on a case-by-case basis considering all of the available evidence.”

As the number of enrolled medical cannabis patients has grown in Ohio, so too is the number of places where they can legally obtain the product. 

A state medical cannabis regulator said last year that Ohio was aiming to double the number of dispensary licenses in the state by adding more than 70 to the existing 58.

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Officials in Virginia are exploring ways to deter drivers from getting behind the wheel after getting stoned, the latest effort by the commonwealth to smooth out its new adult-use cannabis law.

The Virginian-Pilot reports that the “the Virginia Crime Commission — an arm of the General Assembly tasked with studying issues of criminal law and making recommendations — [has] discussed some potential steps police and sheriff’s offices can use to crack down on driving while high,” and that the “commission is expected to meet Dec. 5 to draft their proposals for the legislative session that begins in January.”

“One thing under consideration at the commission’s Nov. 16 meeting: changing state law to allow roadside screening devices in which officers and deputies can have a driver swab his or her cheek in order to gather saliva to test for marijuana and other drugs,” the outlet reported this week. 

“Virginia officials said the ‘oral fluid tests’ under consideration to detect marijuana intoxication are similar to a ‘preliminary breath test’ — a roadside test for alcohol. The test results, while not admissible in court, can help determine when the cannabis was consumed, and can be combined with other factors to get probable cause for extensive blood testing,” the publication continued. 

Kristen Howard, the executive director of the Virginia Crime Commission, told the Virginian-Pilot that officers can “swab the inside of someone’s mouth, and you get a positive or negative and it just gives you some indicators.”

“It’s designed to hone in on the recentness of use — how many hours ago you used this drug,” Howard explained.

The moves come within a month of a survey from the Virginia Cannabis Control Authority (CCA), which showed that a high number of Virginians are comfortable toking and driving. 

According to the survey, roughly 23% reported consuming pot in the past three months and about 14% of drivers in the state said that they have driven high several times in the past year. 

The survey also showed that a third believe marijuana improves their ability to drive safely. 

Virginia officials sounded the alarm on the survey results.

“These results are worrying and underscore the General Assembly was right to direct the CCA to undertake a safe driving campaign,” said John Keohane, a board chair of the Cannabis Control Authority.

Jeremy Preiss, the CCA’s Acting Head and Chief Officer for Regulatory, Policy, and External Affairs, said that the agency must make the issue a priority.

“As a public safety and public health agency, the CCA currently has no greater priority than creating a well-funded, aggressive, and sustained campaign aimed at reducing the incidence of marijuana-impaired driving,” Preiss said. 

Virginia legalized recreational cannabis last year, becoming the first state in the south to do so. 

But that came under a Democratic governor, Ralph Northam. Republicans took back the governor’s mansion last year when Glenn Youngkin was elected. 

Youngkin said from the start that he has no interest in rolling back the marijuana law, but his election––as well as Republicans winning back control of the state House of Delegates––has stymied its implementation.

The Democratic-controlled state Senate passed a bill earlier this year to fast-track the launch of recreational pot sales, but the legislation was rejected in the House.  

Prior to taking office earlier this year, Youngkin spoke about his vision for the new cannabis program.

“When it comes to commercialization, I think there is a lot of work to be done. I’m not against it, but there’s a lot of work to be done,” Youngkin said. “There are some nonstarters, including the forced unionization that’s in the current bill. There have been concerns expressed by law enforcement in how the gap in the laws can actually be enforced. Finally, there’s a real need to make sure that we aren’t promoting an anti-competitive industry. I do understand that there are preferences to make sure that all participants in the industry are qualified to do the industry well.”

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As New York hurtles toward the opening of its new legal recreational marijuana market, the state is apparently “scrambling to develop a way to measure when motorists are driving while under the influence of cannabis since there’s no current standard or valid testing.”

That is according to a report on Sunday in the New York Post, which said that Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration has issued a call for a mechanism to spot weed-impaired drivers.

“With the legalization of adult-use cannabis, there are concerns of increased incidences of driving while impaired after cannabis use,” the New York Department of Health said in a proposal, as quoted by the Post.

“Identifying drivers impaired by cannabis use is of critical importance…..However, unlike alcohol, there are currently no evidence-based methods to detect cannabis-impaired driving,” the memo continued.

The news comes amid budding anticipation for the launch of New York’s first regulated adult-use marijuana retailers. According to the Post, New York is expected to award “up to 175 retail licenses to sell marijuana in the coming weeks.”

Hochul said last week that the state remains on track to launch the new regulated cannabis market by the end of this year.

“We expect the first 20 dispensaries to be open by the end of this year,” Hochul told the Advance Media New York editorial board. “And then every month or so, another 20. So, we’re not going to just jam it out there. It’s going to work and be successful.”

The state began accepting applications for adult-use dispensary licenses on August 25, with the deadline arriving on September 26. New York officials have said that roughly 500 applications had been submitted, while hundreds of applicants were rejected due to being ineligible.

The first dispensary licenses will be designated for individuals who have previously been convicted of a pot-related offense.

“New York State is making history, launching a first-of-its-kind approach to the cannabis industry that takes a major step forward in righting the wrongs of the past,” Hochul said in her announcement of the policy in March. “The regulations advanced by the Cannabis Control Board today will prioritize local farmers and entrepreneurs, creating jobs and opportunity for communities that have been left out and left behind. I’m proud New York will be a national model for the safe, equitable and inclusive industry we are now building.”

Hochul’s predecessor, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, legalized recreational cannabis in the state when he signed a bill into law in March of 2021. The measure immediately ended the state’s ban on possession, but the regulated cannabis market was slow to get off the ground under Cuomo, who stepped down as governor in August of last year amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

After taking over, Hochul made it a priority to get the program up and running, something she touted in her interview with the editorial board last week.

“Talk about the rollout being jammed up. When I became governor, nothing had happened. Nothing. It was shut down because there was a battle between the administration and the legislature over who would be the executive director and the chairs of the cannabis review boards,” she said. “So, I was given a lot of credit because within one week, I named people. I got things going. So, when I speak to people about being part of this industry, the first thing they say is ‘thank you.’ Because otherwise we could still be waiting and waiting and waiting, even for the most basic steps to be taken. So we’ve been moving along quickly.”

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