During a presentation at the Statehouse, members of the Marijuana Advisory Commission also recommended education and prevention programs for young people, along with data collection to measure and track the effects of cannabis legalization on traffic deaths, youth drug use, substance use disorders and criminal activity.
Gov. Phil Scott created the commission by executive order last August. It’s tasked with investigating three primary areas: taxation and regulation, education and prevention, and highway safety.
A draft report was due Monday, but commission cochairs Tom Little and Jake Perkinson were making tweaks to the document Tuesday morning. A final report is due in December.
The presentation came nearly a week after the Vermont Senate passed a bill legalizing marijuana as of July 1. Scott received the legislation Tuesday morning and has said he will sign it into law.
The commission’s recommendations largely focus on how the state should keep track of and regulate the impacts — positive or negative — of legalization. The report does not take a stand on the issue itself.
Health Commissioner Mark Levine emphasized that the state should implement public education and youth prevention programs at least a year before any legalization scheme takes effect.
Levine said that mistakes were made in other states, where education and prevention programs were launched months after pot became legal, “making them a little bit behind the eight-ball already with regards to getting the youth-directed efforts in place.”
The commission recommended a joint education and prevention effort with Scott’s Opioid Coordination Council, which released its first report last week.
On the issue of driving while stoned, the marijuana commission concluded that it’s too soon to recommend a specific standard or testing system. Instead, the panel proposed the creation of a new committee that would study the issue and make its own recommendations.
Levine said law enforcement and health officials would sit on the new panel to “determine whether and when [a] reasonable and scientifically reliable” marijuana impairment test could be put into place.
The commission hasn’t recommended any specific legislative approach to legalization in Vermont, Perkinson said. Instead, it’s looking at how the state can best manage any problems posed by increased availability of the drug and its new legal status.
“To my mind, the most important thing about it is having a conversation about marijuana use in Vermont,” said Perkinson, pointing to a 2015 report that found 80,000 Vermonters already use the drug.
“Obviously it’s not something we can ignore, and whether or not you have legalization, I think it’s important to have the discussions about how to deal with marijuana use, particularly around youth use and driving,” said Perkinson, a former chair of the Vermont Democratic Party.
Colchester Police Chief Jennifer Morrison raised a concern Tuesday about how the new law would affect the use of drug-sniffing police canines. If the scent of marijuana is no longer considered legal grounds for a search, then all dogs trained to detect marijuana would have to be taken out of service, Morrison contended. The canines are not trained to communicate which specific drug they’ve detected, she said.
“That’s a real cost, and to an agency that has a canine, that’s an incredible cost,” Morrison said.
The commission is expected to continue studying legalization, and will specifically examine issues related to a regulated retail market before the next report is due in December.
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No one should drive impaired, but actual impairment should be measured, and the level of impairment from cannabis that is criminalized should be the same as the level of impairment for the .08 blood alcohol level. How to measure impairment? Read on!
I have developed a new public health app that measures actual impairment–it is called DRUID (an acronym for DRiving Under the Influence of Drugs) available now in the App Store and in Google Play. DRUID measures reaction time, decision making, hand-eye coordination, time estimation and balance, and then statistically integrates hundreds of data points into an overall impairment score. DRUID takes just 2 minutes.
NORML of California is promoting DRUID on their website and is encouraging cannabis users to download it.
Our website is http://www.druidapp.com
DRUID allows cannabis users (or others who drink alcohol, use prescription drugs, etc.) to self-assess their own level of impairment and (hopefully) decide against driving if they are impaired. Prior to DRUID, there was no way for an individual to accurately assess their own level of impairment. DRUID also demonstrates that it is feasible to measure impairment reliably by the roadside, not just exposure to a drug. It could also be a way for cannabis users who have developed tolerance to show they are unimpaired.
DRUID was featured on NPRs All Things Considered: http://www.npr.org/2017/01/25/511595978/can-sobriety-tests-weed-out-drivers-whove-smoked-too-much-weed
Also on television: http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2017/02/28/science-lags-behind-marijuana-impairment-testing/
And this past December on Spokane Public Radio: http://nwpr.org/post/progress-made-marijuana-intoxication-measurement-tool-0
After obtaining my Ph.D. at Harvard, I have been a professor of psychology at UMass/Boston for the past 40 years, specializing in research methods, measurement and statistics.
Michael Milburn, Professor
Department of Psychology
UMass/Boston
“Health Commissioner Mark Levine emphasized that the state should implement public education and youth prevention programs at least a year before any legalization scheme takes effect.” Will Scott use this as an excuse to delay signing?
While we’re having this “important discussion,” let’s not ignore that the preponderance of the research shows marijuana consumption is NOT a significant cause of auto accidents.
Marijuana is not alcohol. In 2015, the Drug and Alcohol Crash Risk report, produced by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, found that while drunken driving dramatically increased the risk of getting into an accident, there was no evidence that using marijuana heightened that risk.
In fact, after adjusting for age, gender, race and alcohol use, the report found that drivers who had recently consumed marijuana were no more likely to crash than drivers who were not under the influence of any alcohol or drugs.
Punishing marijuana consumers simply because they drive is very BAD policy. — If it’s not broken, don’t “fix” it!
News of the Druid app is very interesting. I heard a saliva test is also being developed. As for dogs trained to sniff out marijuana (and other drugs) — why retire the dog? If there is probable cause to stop a driver (weaving all over the road, etc.,)when do you bring in a drug dog? The new law forbids smoking pot (or allowing a passenger to do so) while driving — much like Vermont’s open container law. If the officer can smell freshly-smoked pot, and the dog alerts to pot in the car, seems to me the driver should at least get a ticket for “driving while smoking pot” or allowing someone else in the car to do so. Or they could issue a written warning, and collect data on how many drivers who were stopped for something had the odor of marijuana in their vehicles.
Margo Howland
To have a way of measuring how recent the pot smoking might have been, they could try some experiments at the labs involving lighting a joint with a legal amount of marijuana in it, letting it smolder for measurable periods of time in an enclosed space like a car, and then removing it. Then they could check the empty car in 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour, 4 hours, and the next day to see if they could still smell it. They could chart the results, and have some idea of how recent pot might have been smoked. They could even take air samples. and be able to tell the difference between pot smoked in the car (illegal) and pot smoke on the clothes of somebody who had smoked pot at home before getting into the car (not illegal) … I’m sure at some point they can come up with something that will pass muster.
Margo Howland