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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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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