Dianne Feinstein Says Stoned Drivers Ruin Marijuana Legalization for Everyone

Yesterday Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

told the Associated Press she opposes marijuana legalization in
her state partly because she worries about stoned drivers. “The
risk of people using marijuana and driving is very substantial,”
she said. A.P. helped Feinstein make her case by citing “a possible
example”:

The California Highway Patrol is investigating a fatal weekend
collision in Santa Rosa as being related to marijuana use. A woman
and her daughter-in-law were killed when a Toyota Camry in which
they were riding was rear-ended by a pickup truck. A preliminary
CHP investigation determined that the 30-year-old man driving the
pickup was impaired by marijuana and reading a text message on his
cellphone at the time of the collisioin.

If this case is evidence in favor of marijuana prohibition, it
is also evidence in favor of cellphone prohibition. By the same
token, the fact that people die in alcohol-related crashes is
evidence in favor of alcohol prohibition. In fact, since alcohol
impairs driving ability more dramatically than marijuana does,
legalizing pot might actually reduce traffic fatalities, to the
extent that more pot smoking is accompanied by less drinking. There
is evidence of such an effect in states that have legalized
marijuana for medical use. States like California, where
traffic fatalities fell by 30 percent between 1996, when voters
approved medical marijuana, and 2011. Even when you control for the
nationwide decline during that period, adoption of medical
marijuana laws is associated with
a drop in fatal crashes, as opposed to the increase feared by
Feinstein. The senator does not seem to have noticed that her own
state, where the doctor’s recommendations that allow medical use
are notoriously easy to obtain, has been testing her hypothesis for
almost two decades.

Feinstein offered another reason for opposing marijuana
legalization:

She said serving on the California Women’s Board of Terms and
Parole during the 1960s allowed her to see how marijuana, in her
view, led to bigger problems for many female inmates.

“I saw a lot of where people began with marijuana and went on to
hard drugs,” Feinstein said.

The “gateway drug” theory espoused by Feinstein is at least 63
years old, and it is no more credible today than when Federal
Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger was citing it
as a reason to fear marijuana. In addition to the conceptual
problems with Feinstein’s theory, you may have noticed a
weakness in her research methods. When you draw your sample of
cannabis consumers from a population of prisoners, it is hardly
surprising if you find that cannabis consumption is associated with
bad outcomes. Such as going to prison. If Feinstein wants to draw a
causal link between smoking pot and “bigger problems,” she will
have to do better than that.

Or maybe she won’t. It all depends on whether we are past the
period when pot prohibitionists could get by with unsubstantiated
fears and anecdotes from the 1960s.
Polling data suggest we might be.