Friday, December 02, 2005

Cannabis v. Booze.

A new study found that the risk for being responsible for a fatal accident while under the influence of cannabis is doubled. This will undoutedly give fuel to people who support a crackdown on cannabis use, but it really depends how you present this.
There is more to it than presented by some media and the study also has other findings that give some interesting perspective:
The prevalence of cannabis (2.9%) estimated for the driving population is similar to that for alcohol (2.7%). At least 2.5% (1.5% to 3.5%) of fatal crashes were estimated as being attributable to cannabis, compared with 28.6% for alcohol (26.8% to 30.5%)
And indeed the study concludes:
Driving under the influence of cannabis increases the risk of involvement in a crash. However, in France its share in fatal crashes is significantly lower than that associated with positive blood alcohol concentration.
So this actually undermines the argument against the legalization of cannabis. If alcohol which kills 10 times as much is legal, why not cannabis?

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