With some Canadians poised to give the gift of legal weed for a fourth year in a row this holiday season, a new study has found no increase in traffic injuries in Alberta and Ontario following cannabis legalization.
The University of British Columbia (UBC) study reviewed all Alberta and Ontario emergency department data from April 1, 2015, to Dec. 31, 2019. Based on this data, the research team concluded there was no evidence of significant changes in emergency department visits due to tragic injury immediately after cannabis legalization.
Russ Callaghan, professor in the UBC school of population and public health, said in a press release the study’s findings are “somewhat surprising.”
“I predicted that legalization would increase cannabis use and cannabis-impaired driving in the population, and that this pattern would lead to increases in traffic-injury presentations to emergency departments,” Callaghan said in the release.
Callaghan noted stricter federal legislation surrounding impaired driving came into effect in 2018, and may have contributed to the study’s findings.
In the release, Callaghan gave the example of Bill C-46, which amended drug-impaired driving laws. Some of these amendments included more severe penalties for impaired driving due to cannabis and alcohol use, and permitted police to perform roadside testing of saliva for THC.
The release noted Alberta and Ontario were included in the study because these were the only two Canadian provinces capturing all emergency department visits in the general population, including youth.
The UBC project included researchers from the University of Northern British Columbia, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, the University of Victoria, and Dalhousie University.
With this study concluded, Callaghan and his team are now in the process of conducting a follow-up study to examine the impacts of cannabis legalization on traffic fatalities in Canada from 2010-2020. The results of this additional study should be available in summer of 2022, the release said.
While the UBC report focused on increases in traffic injuries, a nation-wide report conducted by Statistics Canada found police reported 6,453 drug-impaired driving incidents in 2019, representing eight per cent of all impaired driving incidents.
These 2019 incidents of drug-impaired driving amounted to a 43-per-cent increase from the previous year, the report said.
Inversely, the report — titled “Impaired Driving in Canada” — noted the rate of alcohol-impaired driving fell by 20 per cent from 2009 to 2019.
