Smell of weed on N.J. and Philly roads spurs fears of unsafe driving

Cars whiz by Robin Winzinger on the highway, trailing pungent odors that land like a slap in the face.

“It stinks like you just ran over a skunk out there,” said Winzinger, 60, who’s been smelling a whole lot more marijuana on the road since legal sales of recreational cannabis began in New Jersey last year.

“I don’t want to be Debbie Downer, but it’s inappropriate,” added Winzinger, the owner of Robin’s Nest restaurant in Mount Holly. “I don’t feel safe with my kids in the car as people impaired by smoking weed drive around me.

“I get that cannabis is the wave of the future, a big money maker for the state. But as a parent and business owner, I’m not a fan.”

While 67% of New Jerseyans approved the 2020 ballot question legalizing recreational marijuana — leading to licensed sales starting last April — a growing number of people are concerned that they’re smelling too much weed on the road. That’s kicking off fears that many motorists are high, making driving unsafe.

“You absolutely smell it more on the highway,” said Assemblyman Kevin Rooney (R., Bergen). He’s sponsored a bill in the Legislature requiring New Jersey State Police to annually release data depicting fatal car crashes involving cannabis impairment.

“Legalizing marijuana was a money grab for state revenue, and we did nothing to educate the public on driving impairment” beforehand, Rooney said. “We put the cart way before the horse.”

Gov. Phil Murphy has said he’s supported cannabis legalization as a way to address disproportionate marijuana arrests in communities of color.

While there’s odoriferous evidence of weed at speed in New Jersey, the scent is evident across the Delaware, as well.

“We smell marijuana on drivers at checkpoints we have for DUI interdiction,” said Philadelphia Police Capt. Mark Overwise, commanding officer of the Crash Investigation Division. “With this new recreational use in New Jersey, there are a lot of people not experienced with the effects of driving while using marijuana.”

Marijuana use can hinder skills required for safe driving by slowing reaction time and ability to make decisions, impairing coordination, and distorting perception, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can also increase paranoia, which could induce a panic attack while driving.

“Many feel like, ‘Now, I can drive buzzed,’” Overwise continued. But “that makes things more dangerous.”

The New Jersey Division of Highway Traffic Safety declined to answer questions about motorists driving while smoking marijuana.

Instead, the agency listed state police statistics on crashes in 2021, before licensed sales of cannabis began. They show that 89 of the 667 fatal crashes that year (13.3%) involved a driver who tested positive for cannabis.

However, a spokesperson stressed, that doesn’t mean the crashes were caused by a motorist driving under the influence of marijuana. “Positive results … do not indicate the level of the driver’s impairment at the time of the crash,” the spokesperson said. The person added that cannabis-related driving data for 2022 is still being collected and couldn’t be provided.

It isn’t easy to know precisely whether cannabis impairment caused a person to crash in a particular accident. There’s not an equivalent of a Breathalyzer test, which delineates accurate alcohol levels in drivers.

Also, THC, the major psychoactive component of marijuana, can be detected in a person’s system for as much as four weeks, long after it was smoked or ingested in gummies or brownies, scientists say.

So, if a person tests positive for THC after a crash, that doesn’t say they were high at the moment of the collision, science tells us.

Nevertheless, researchers writing in the journal, Fronts in Psychiatry in 2021, warned there is a “mathematical certainty that the problem of cannabis-impaired driving will worsen... .[Such driving] “is an underappreciated risk, and one with growing public health consequences.”

Traffic accidents have increased in many places where recreational marijuana is legal; while there’s no clear causation, statistics show, there is correlation.

A study in 2022 of five of the 21 states that have legalized recreational cannabis — Colorado, Washington, Oregon, California, and Nevada — car crashes with injury went up 6%, and fatal crashes increased by 4% since legalization, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

No such increases were seen in states that hadn’t made recreational weed legal, according to the study. New Jersey hasn’t done a similar study.

Statistics show there’s an increasing number of car accidents near marijuana dispensaries around the country, according to Reagan Wetherill, psychiatry professor at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Addiction Studies in the Perelman School of Medicine. That data was not made available in New Jersey.

“I get nervous when people are driving sober, much less when they’re using cannabis,” she said, “And I’ve been smelling it more on the road myself.”

Wetherill added, “Recreational marijuana got pushed out without us knowing the health consequences, like vaping and, years ago, like cigarettes. We find public health consequences only after the fact. That’s disconcerting. Let’s figure out the science first.”

Sara Jane Ward, professor in the Center for Substance Abuse Research at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, agreed. “So much work needs to be done to figure out how to be safe now that legal recreational cannabis is here,” she said. “People want a robust and reliable way to measure impairment.”

But because THC lingers in the body, that measure is illusive.

Ward said she’s “confident” that using field sobriety tests of a driver suspected of causing an accident while high “would be a more accurate indicator of impairment than relying on learning THC levels” in blood and urine.

Vito Abrusci, a former Morris County police lieutenant, is a so-called Drug Recognition Expert who’s conducted extensive examinations of drivers in accidents. He’s sometimes hired by defense attorneys to review police DUI investigations.

Abrusci agrees that sobriety tests currently trump THC testing, given THC’s tendency to attach to fatty tissue in the body and remain detectable for as long as a month.

Police officers trained in DRE techniques nationwide can spend an hour or more with a person involved in an accident, administering coordination, balance, and eye tests, Abrusci said. The officer also checks temperature, pulse, and blood pressure levels.

It’s not foolproof and the tests can turn up intoxication to drugs other than THC, Abrusci acknowledged. Also, there’s often cross use of intoxicants, he added, saying that people commonly combine alcohol with marijuana.

“In my conversations with police officers across New Jersey,” he said, “it’s obvious you smell marijuana more on the highway. And that doesn’t take in people driving on gummies.

“But the scientific community hasn’t created a system saying how much marijuana makes you impaired, or whether the THC in your body caused your crash. I don’t know how long it’ll take to get a proper testing program in place. But it comes down to scientists — not politicians, not police.”

Meanwhile, expect to sniff more weed when you drive, said Avery Gilbert, former smell scientist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in University City, which researches smell and taste.

“Burning cannabis is very distinctive, and the funky, skunky, vegetative smell carries a long way from cars,” said Gilbert, now owner of Headspace Sensory LLC, a start-up company in Colorado that is quantifying the aroma profiles of cannabis.

“So if you smell it on the highway, it tells you to put distance between you and whichever driver you think is smoking.”