Legalization doesn’t appear to have had much of an impact on roadway safety in Colorado:
Here’s a month-by-month comparison of highway fatalities in Colorado through the first seven months of this year and last year. For a more thorough comparison, I’ve also included the highest fatality figures for each month since 2002, the lowest for each month since 2002 and the average for each month since 2002. As you can see, roadway fatalities this year are down from last year, and down from the 13-year average. Of the seven months so far this year, five months saw a lower fatality figure this year than last, two months saw a slightly higher figure this year, and in one month the two figures were equal.
One longstanding theory is that more pot use will mean less alcohol use. You can’t infer than from this data, but it sure looks encouraging. Can you imagine what prohibition will look like in retrospect if it emerges that legalizing weed saves lots of lives? And there’s more good news for the Rocky Mountain State: Matt Steinglass got high in both Amsterdam and Boulder and came away touting the latter experience:
I smoked the joint sitting on the patio of the house where I was staying [in Colorado] that evening. This, rather than the issue of legality, is probably why it was more pleasurable to smoke in Boulder than in Amsterdam, even though buying the product had been much more clinical. It was a starry night, and the house was on a wide hillside facing west; the still masses of the Rockies registered as deeper darknesses along the horizon. At its best, smoking pot gives one an expanded spatial awareness and a sense of freedom, but in Amsterdam the atmosphere had been wrong. … Amsterdam has always tried to create a sense of freedom within the rules and infrastructure of a dense urban port-city landscape. But the open, no-limits sprawl of Boulder, edging up into the empty mountains, seemed a better fit for that mind-enlarging ganja feeling.
But if geography matters so much, why is Rhode Island the highest state in America?
Much more Dish on stoned driving here.
The Dish 