Where Pedestrian Deaths Are Up, Is Marijuana to Blame?<br />“I’d be cautious about drawing a direct link to any potential cause,” said Jason Levine, executive director at the Center for Auto Safety,<br />an advocacy group in Washington, D. C. “But it’s certainly worth trying to figure out why those numbers are what they are.”<br />Among the unanswered questions is whether and to what extent any link reflects marijuana use by drivers, pedestrians or both.<br />But this year, the group also called attention to the numbers for states<br />that legalized recreational marijuana between 2012 and 2016 — Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Washington — as well as the District of Columbia, which did likewise.<br />Over the first six months of 2017, pedestrian fatalities rose sharply from a year earlier in states<br />that had legalized recreational marijuana, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.<br />“We are not making a definitive, cause-and-effect link to marijuana,” said Richard Retting,<br />a traffic safety engineer at Sam Schwartz Consulting who was the author of the study.
