12 million Americans drive high on weed — and alcohol numbers are worse, CDC warns
A startling number of United States residents drive high on marijuana — but the numbers for drunk driving are still far worse, according to federal estimates released this week.
About 4.7 percent of Americans older than 16 reported driving under the influence of marijuana last year, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers said in a report on Friday. That number suggests roughly 12 million people drove while high on pot in 2018.
“Any person who uses cannabis should not be operating a motor vehicle. Period,’’ said Robert Glatter, an ER doctor at New York City’s Lenox Hill Hospital, according to USA Today. “It places themselves, other drivers and all pedestrians at risk for death and injury.’’
Still, that eye-popping marijuana number is dwarfed by the number of Americans who drove drunk: 8 percent of Americans, or about 20 million people, admitted to driving under the influence of alcohol, according to CDC researchers.
A smaller but still alarming share of Americans — 0.9 percent of the over-16 population, or roughly 2.3 million people — said they had driven under the influence of drugs other than weed in the previous 12 months, researchers said. Drugs listed in the survey included cocaine, hallucinogens, heroin, inhalants and methamphetamine.
“An estimated 10,511 alcohol-impaired driving deaths occurred in 2018,” researchers said — but they added that “the contribution of marijuana and other illicit drugs to these and other impaired driving deaths remains unknown.”
The CDC’s newly released estimates are all based on data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which is conducted annually, researchers said.
The report is significant, researchers said, in that it “provides the most recent national estimates of self-reported driving under the influence of marijuana and illicit drugs... using 2018 public-use data from NSDUH.”
To gather the data used in these estimates, federal researchers perform “household face-to-face interviews using a computer-assisted personal interviewing system” with Americans older than 12 — but those younger than 16 were taken out for this analysis because they are usually too young to legally drive, CDC researchers said.
There were major demographic variations in the percentage of people who reported driving after using marijuana: Far more men and boys reported driving high on weed or other drugs (at 6.2 percent and 1.3 percent respectively) compared to women and girls. Only about 3.2 percent of women and girls reported driving on marijuana, while 0.5 percent reported driving on other drugs,researchers said.
Younger people were much more likely to drive high on pot, with 12.4 percent of people 21 to 25 reporting driving under the influence of marijuana in the past year, compared with just 0.6 percent of people 65 or older, researchers said.
“Impaired driving is a serious public health concern,” CDC researchers wrote in the report. “Standardized testing for alcohol and drugs among impaired drivers and drivers involved in fatal crashes could advance understanding of drug- and polysubstance-impaired driving and assist states and communities with targeted prevention efforts.”
