Police said Ronald Hayes was high on drugs and alcohol and desperate to escape officers in Maryland, when he ran a red light and smashed into the side of a minivan filled with women and children, killing two of them.
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However, according to USA Today, there is not enough data of how drugs can affect drivers.
Driving while under the influence of marijuana and other drugs is on the rise in the United States and could be involved in a large number of fatal accidents, a new report finds.
In all, 40 percent of fatally injured drivers tested positive for drugs in 2013. That rivals the number of drivers who died with alcohol in their system.
He is particularly concerned that lawmakers are not considering the impact of marijuana on deadly crashes when talking about legalizing the drug.
That’s according to a report from the Governors’ Highway Safety Association.
“While this report summarizes the research and data available, it also highlights how much remains unknown”, report author Jim Hedlund, a former senior NHTSA official, said in the news release. “Alcohol-impaired driving is still a big deal, but we have paid more attention to it than to drug-impaired driving and it’s time to pay more attention to drug-impaired driving”. One found that was there an increased marijuana presence in fatally injured drivers in only three of 14 states studied. “Marijuana, we don’t know what that level should be”, she said. The third, in California, found no change after marijuana was decriminalized there in 2011. There are 18 states with either zero tolerance laws for driving with marijuana or that set limits on the legal level. “Marijuana use by drivers likely increases after a state permits recreational marijuana use”.
Police in Pennsylvania have increased their focus on drugged driving in recent years, with more than 130 officers in various jurisdictions receiving intensive training as drug recognition experts. The report has recommended better public education, and most drivers in surveys have said that they don’t believe marijuana causes impairment while a few said it improves their performance behind the wheel.
This marijuana-verses-alcohol driving study also concluded that accurately testing drivers for marijuana intoxication, and developing a threshold of what’s considered too high to drive, is very hard, if not impossible.
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Any drug – prescription, over-the-counter or illegal – can impair a person’s ability to safely operate a vehicle, the report authors said.
