While 67% of New Jerseyans approved the 2020 ballot question legalizing recreational marijuana — leading to licensed sales starting last April — a growing number of people are concerned that they’re smelling too much weed on the road.
“You absolutely smell it more on the highway,” said state Assemblyman Kevin Rooney . He’s sponsored a bill in the Legislature requiring New Jersey State Police to annually release data depicting fatal car crashes involving cannabis impairment.
“We smell marijuana on drivers at checkpoints we have for DUI interdiction,” said Philadelphia Police Capt. Mark Overwise, commanding officer of the Crash Investigation Division. “With this new recreational use in New Jersey, there are a lot of people not experienced with the effects of driving while using marijuana.”
Instead, the agency listed state police statistics on crashes in 2021, before licensed sales of cannabis began. They show that 89 of the 667 fatal crashes that year involved a driver who tested positive for cannabis. So, if a person tests positive for THC after a crash, that doesn’t say they were high at the moment of the collision, science tells us.
No such increases were seen in states that hadn’t made recreational weed legal, according to the study. New Jersey hasn’t done a similar study. Sara Jane Ward, professor in the Center for Substance Abuse Research at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, agreed. “So much work needs to be done to figure out how to be safe now that legal recreational cannabis is here,” she said. “People want a robust and reliable way to measure impairment.
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