The federal marijuana rescheduling hearing turned Tuesday to a danger the government’s own proposal barely mentions: drugged driving. DUID Victim Voices opened its case with a single witness, Ed Wood, who told the court the government never seriously weighed what rescheduling would do to road safety, and that the omission alone should sink it.
Wood came to the issue the hardest way possible. In 2010, his son Brian, a video game designer whose wife was eight months pregnant, was killed instantly when a vehicle driven by two drug-impaired women crossed a Washington highway and crashed through his windshield. Both drivers tested positive for marijuana and methamphetamine, one also for heroin, yet neither could be convicted of driving under the influence. Wood spent the next sixteen years studying the science of drugged driving and founded DUID Victim Voices to keep other families from the same outcome. Counsel for DUID, Connor Mighell, walked him through that history before the court provisionally accepted him as an expert on drugged driving.
The heart of Wood’s testimony was data. In Washington, one of the few states with reliable numbers, the share of fatal crashes involving THC climbed from roughly 7 percent to 27 percent between 2008 and 2016, and polydrug use became the leading factor in fatal crashes after commercialization. Drawing on three peer-reviewed studies of states that opened commercial markets, Wood estimated that nationwide commercialization would add more than 6,000 traffic deaths a year.
He was equally direct about enforcement. Unlike alcohol, he explained, marijuana has no scientifically valid blood limit that tracks impairment, a conclusion shared by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the National Safety Council, NHTSA and the National District Attorneys Association. THC is fat-soluble, so blood levels fall quickly even as impairment sets in, and a delay of a couple of hours before a blood draw can push a genuinely impaired driver below the legal threshold. Colorado’s own records, he noted, show prosecutors win 94 percent of alcohol-only DUI cases but only 73 percent of THC cases, and that the state’s 5 nanogram limit does little to separate the impaired from the sober.
His warning tied it together. Rescheduling would tell the public marijuana is safer than the government long said, more people would use it, more would drive after using, and the country has no reliable tool to catch them. The government, he testified, never assessed that risk at all. The hearing continues this week.