BOSTON – A new report analyzing vehicular accidents in Washington found that the number of fatal crashes involving drivers who recently used marijuana doubled after the state legalized the drug in 2012 giving new ammunition to legalization opponents in Massachusetts, where a recent poll showed voters split on the issue.
The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety released its research Tuesday showing that the percentage of drivers involved in fatal crashes who recently used marijuana more than doubled from 8 percent to 17 percent between 2013 and 2014. One in six drivers involved in a fatal crash in Washington in 2014 had recently used the drug, according to the foundation.
In the recent book that we jointly wrote, "Aligning Values and Politics: Empowerment versus Entitlement" (University Press of America, 2016), we mention Barbara Anderson as the very first person deserving of our gratitude and acknowledgment. We did so for two reasons. The ideas in the book were fomented and developed in the forum Citizens for Limited Taxation, which she helped create; but far more importantly Barbara took both a principled and a pragmatic approach to problem-solving, demanding that people not just diagnose problems, but come up with the policies that help solve those problems. Barbara defined herself as an "owl" (old wise libertarian) whose first allegiance was to the U.S. Constitution, including the power that individuals and the states retained under that document. We illustrate below some consequences of this attitude.
