With the introduction of the unofficial marijuana holiday, 4/20, people became more concerned over the potentially higher rates of impaired driving. This resulted from prior research stating that the numbers spiked on April 20 by as much as 12 percent. The latest study took a slightly different approach than these past studies by widening the data pool to include the whole year.

Study

The researchers at McGill University conducted three separate analyses. In one study, the researchers compared traffic fatalities on April 20 to control days one week. These control days occurred before and after the holiday. This was the same data set used in the previous studies. The next analysis examined the aforementioned control days and control days two weeks before and after the holiday. The last analysis compared 4/20 traffic fatalities to all of the rest of the days in the year.

Results

After examining the data from the different analyses, they found that there was very little evidence in the belief that traffic deaths increased in number when compared to any of the control periods. The evidence showed that there was obvious and meaningful variation in the daily numbers of fatal traffic crashes between the years of 1975 to 2016. This means that there was too much of a variation in the numbers for them to find a pattern.

They did find that there was a slight increase on 4/20 between the years 1992 and 2016. However, this was only when comparing the one-week control days that the previous studies used.

Discussion

With these numbers, the researchers showed that the belief that traffic deaths increased on the unofficial marijuana holiday is potentially inaccurate. In fact, it shows that it is more common on holidays like the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. It is because these holidays are when there are more people on the road.

However, researchers still need to investigate these claims in order for the results to be accepted by the general public. If they are able to continue examining the results, researchers may help pave the way for legislatures to address driving laws while considering the legalization of cannabis.

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