You may have been living under a rock to not hear the news that Canada has legalized recreational marijuana aka cannabis, pot, weed, Mary Jane. Canada has been through some rigorous political movements to take this step and while millions rejoice, there comes added warnings about road safety. Driving impaired is a serious issue in road safety and a new study from McGill University, Canada has issued findings that show young drivers are once again at particular risk on the road if driving under the influence of cannabis.

Young people who use cannabis and drive are at greater risk of being involved in a vehicular collision even if five hours have elapsed since inhaling it, according to a McGill University study published Monday.

The research, published just two days before cannabis was legalized across the country, found that performance declined significantly in key areas such as reaction time after inhaling the equivalent of less than one typical joint.

“This new trial provides important Canadian evidence that cannabis can affect the skills needed to drive safely even five hours after consuming,” Jeff Walker, chief strategy officer for the Canadian Automobile Association, said in a statement.

The CAA funded the clinical trial by the Montreal-based Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre and McGill University.

A message from the Canadian Government says:
Cannabis can impair each person differently. The impairment on individuals can depend on:

• The method of consumption, for example how cannabis was consumed (smoked, inhaled, ingested;
• The quantity of cannabis consumed;
• The variety of cannabis and its THC levels, including cannabis prescribed for medical use.

As a result, there is no guidance to drivers about how much cannabis can be consumed before it is unsafe to drive or how long a driver should wait to drive after consuming cannabis.

Don’t take a chance. Don’t drive high

As is the case in Canada, driving under the influence of weed is illegal in most cases. Under new legislation passed in June, police can conduct roadside saliva tests of drivers they suspect to be under the influence of drugs. How drivers will be treated depends on how much THC, the primary psychoactive substance in pot, is found in their blood.

• Drivers with between two and five nanograms in their blood could face a fine of up to $1,000.
• Drivers with either more than five nanograms, or who were drinking alcohol and consuming cannabis at the same time, could face steeper fines and jail time.
• People convicted in the most serious cases could face 10 years in prison.

“If you consume, don’t drive,” he said. “Find another way home or stay where you are.”

The clinical trial examined the effects of cannabis on driving reflexes among occasional consumers aged 18 to 24 years.

A total of 45 study participants, 21 of whom were women, were put in a driving simulator and exposed to “the kinds of distractions common on the road.” Research participants also took computerized tests that assess attention abilities.

Participants completed simulations at one, three and five hours after inhalation of a standard 100-mg dose of cannabis through a vaporizer (a typical joint is 300-500 mg of dried cannabis). Participants were also tested with no cannabis in their system.
‘Significant impairment’ complex driving tasks

While the cannabis dose did not affect simple, distraction-free driving, there was “significant impairment on complex and novel driving-related tasks,” according to the peer-reviewed findings, which were published in CMAJ Open, an open-access journal published by the Canadian Medical Association.

The complex or novel tasks included situations such as avoiding sudden obstacles, like a child crossing the street unexpectedly or driving through a busy intersection.

“This is really what driving is all about: you always have to be on your toes,” the study’s co-author Isabelle Gélinas told CBC Montreal’s Daybreak Monday. She is a researcher in McGill’s School of Physical and Occupational Therapy.

In addition, a large percentage of participants reported they didn’t feel as safe to drive after consuming cannabis, even five hours after use.

The study says the findings substantiate Canada’s Lower-Risk Cannabis Use Guidelines, developed by the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse in 2017 and endorsed by the Canadian Public Health Association, which recommend waiting six hours after cannabis use before driving.

In the UK, drug driving’s penalties are the same as drink driving:

Increasing evidence

Gélinas says the clinical trial’s findings add to the growing amount of scientific evidence proving cannabis does affect driving ability.

“The findings provide new evidence on the extent to which driving-related performance is compromised following a typical dose of inhaled cannabis, even at five hours after use,” Gélinas said in the statement.

It wasn’t a surprise that driving is impaired by cannabis consumption, she said, but how long drivers are affected was an important finding.She said she has heard of ongoing studies that are looking at cannabis’s affect on driving up to 24 hours after consumption.

Young drivers ‘more at risk’

Young drivers are already more likely to be involved in a collision, Gélinas said, and they are “smoking more cannabis. So this combination makes them even more at risk in terms of accidents.”

The study, however, did not look at how it affects more mature drivers. Because of age-related changes seen in older, experienced drivers, Gélinas said the study could produce different results.

“They are totally different groups, but [it would be] interesting to look at that in the future,” she said. The study should help people, especially young drivers, be more aware of the dangers of driving after consuming cannabis.

Drivers, she said, should wait a “significant amount of time” before getting behind the wheel.CAA is committed to furthering “this important road safety issue, but governments must step up too,” Walker concludes, pushing for more funding to study the effects of cannabis on driving.

With files from CBC Montreal’s Daybreak – read the original article

 An infographic on cannabis and driving from the Canadian government:

The following is excerpted from “Building the Cycling City,” by Melissa and Chris Brunlett, published by Island Press. In it, the authors elevate examples from five Dutch cities as “blueprints” for creating an accessible urban cycling culture and explore how those examples have inspired other cities around the world.

As the home of Royal Philips Electronics for more than 125 years, the southern Netherlands city of Eindhoven — now the country’s fifth largest, with more than a quarter-million residents — once epitomized the industrial heart of the country. During that period, its design, development, and economic vitality were inextricably linked to the electronics giant — long the city’s largest employer, ever since the lightbulb factory opened its doors during the First World War.

Right after the war ended, recognizing the unprecedented growth a booming Philips would bring, Eindhoven hired nationally renowned architects Pierre Cuypers and Louis Kooken to develop a master plan for the region. Their inspiration — the “Garden City” imagined by British planner Ebenezer Howard — would prove to be a precursor for modernist thought. The five villages surrounding Eindhoven would be annexed and connected by a “ring road” intended solely for automobiles, while residential living would be pushed to suburbs outside of that perimeter. The interior would be for industry and shopping, a geographic separation of the three main functions of daily life: dwelling, business, and commerce.

At First, Appeasing Motorists Instead of Encouraging Cyclists
“From the very beginning, the city was planned and designed for the car,” suggests Bas Braakman, bicycle policy advisor for the City of Eindhoven. “That means the mindset of the inhabitants is still very much car-based. We face a bit more struggle than other cities, like Amsterdam and Utrecht, in making the transition to more sustainable modes of transport.”

The motor vehicle was seen as a status symbol, an expression of luxury, and a way to stimulate economic activity in the central area, recounts Frank Veraart, assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology, and co-author of “Cycling Cities: The European Experience.” “They viewed the car as a vehicle of wealth. So if you welcomed cars into your town, drivers would stop and spend their money.” For Eindhoven, this meant building a number of roads through the city center and setting aside vast spaces for customers to park while shopping and dining.

In 1947, even as that status symbol grew in popularity across the region, people on bikes still constituted 71 percent of road users in Eindhoven (with motorists a mere 6 percent). Vertical separation became one of the popular ways to get cyclists out of sight (and out of mind), as was the case of the Woenselse railroad crossing, a major bottleneck for the huge number of Philips employees biking between the factory and Woensel, a blue-collar neighborhood to the north. Often these gates would remain closed for five hours a day, causing massive delays for commuters. A solution wasn’t implemented until 1953, when a tunnel was built to allow passage for cars, which proved equally beneficial to cyclists.

A brand-new train station was built three years later, but even still, decisions surrounding that were made with an eye on making it easier for motor vehicles to move freely throughout the city. “They elevated the railway tracks,” explains Veraart. “That relieved traffic, so it could flow without hindrance. At that time, the whole idea was building the city for cars, rather than bicycles.” This was in spite of the fact that, as late as the 1960s, 80 per­cent of all Philips employees (from factory workers to corporate executives) cycled to work daily.

Then, in 1961, the City hired German civil engineer Karl Schaechterle­, a colleague and successor of M. E. Feuchtinger, the man who had proposed the calamitous demolition of Utrecht’s medieval center five years earlier, to draw up a traffic plan to solve their ever-worsening congestion and road­ safety problems. His idea, in its most basic form, was to prevent the “slow” traffic from obstructing the “fast” traffic, realized through dedicated bike paths and tunnels built adjacent to and underneath new car-only thoroughfares — wide, seamless boulevards that greatly expanded the capacity of the existing ring road as they radiated from the suburbs into the city center. One of the more interesting experiments in this vertical separation was the Berenkuil (Bear Pit) — a sunken bicycle roundabout built in the early 1970s below the intersection of the perimeter ring road and one of those radial roads.

Eindhoven continued implementing both horizontal and vertical separation into the next decade, completing a 155-kilometer (100-mile) network of cycle paths and eight tunnels and bridges by 1976. Separating these transportation networks, however, was more about appeasing frustrated motorists than encouraging and enabling cyclists. “We were one of the cities in the Netherlands that were the quickest and most serious in doing that,” claims Braakman. “But it was not meant to facilitate cycling at all. It was meant to facilitate car drivers.” That meant the bicycle routes were often indirect and inconvenient, forcing cyclists to take uncomfortable and unnecessary detours, as was the case of the Berenkuil.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

Next month, we will be running a special panel session entitled, “Youth have their say” as part of The World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims 2018 conference in Malta. The event is themed around “Roads with stories”, and is being organized by the World Health Organization in Malta. As part of the day, the panel discussion will bring together a range of youth voices and has been organized in collaboration between the Malta Medical Students Association and YOURS.

We will be leading the youth panel discussion to draw attention to the incredible work that young people can undertake globally.

Chair/moderator:

• Joao Breda, WHO (tbc); Floor Lieshout Executive Director, Youth for Road Safety (YOURS)

Panelists:

• Alex Esposito,Malta Medical Students Association (MMSA)
• Rebecca Ashton, Campaigns & Media Manager .FIA Foundation
• Priscilla Le Lièvre, Project Officer, European Transport Safety Council
• Jacob Smith, Global Road Safety Activist
• Michael Piccinino,  President, Maltese National Youth Council (KNŻ)

The session focuses on how young people around the world have already taken action for road safety to ensure their peers can be safer on the road, both as safe road users and beneficiaries of a safe system.

More details about the event will be highlighted on our Twitter account where you can expect live tweets from the event.

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