(The Center Square)–As marijuana legalization spreads across the U.S., transportation and road safety organizations are sounding the alarm that driving high is just as dangerous as driving drunk — and much more complicated.
Marijuana, the THC-containing part of the cannabis plant, impairs driving performance by diminishing motor coordination, multitasking abilities, reaction time and distance perception, according to a report from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Impairment also lasts up to five times longer than alcohol intoxication, which usually wears off within eight hours.
But few Americans know about these dangerous effects or how long they persist, posing serious road safety concerns as drugged driving becomes more common.
In a March study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, found roughly 85% of 2,000 cannabis users reported driving the same day they use the drug. Only 19% thought their driving became worse after cannabis use and 34% believed they drove better after use.
“It is super clear that there are some real misperceptions about driving and cannabis use and the safety of it,” Rebecca Steinbach, who led the AAA FTS survey, told The Center Square. “We know that cannabis can impair your physical and motor function and your decision-making, and drivers aren’t always the best judge of whether they’re impaired.”
Since 2014, 24 states and the District of Columbia have fully legalized marijuana within their borders, while 13 other states allow medical marijuana.
Even where marijuana is legal, impaired driving is against the law. However, data indicates that increased marijuana usage has led to higher numbers of high drivers.
An AAA FTS study in 2020 compared cannabis use among drivers in fatal crashes in Washington before and after the state legalized recreational marijuana.
It revealed that the number of drivers involved in fatal crashes who tested positive for THC more than tripled from five years before the legalization law took effect in 2012. Additionally, both the number of crashes statewide and the number of THC-positive drivers involved in those fatal crashes increased.
A larger study by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) in 2022 examined drug use in 7,279 seriously or fatally injured roadway crash victims. It found that nearly half of those in the sample who tested positive for drugs — 55.8% — had cannabinoids in their system, topping the number of those who tested positive for alcohol.
Another 2022 report, conducted by the NTSB, found that cannabis was detected in approximately a third of drivers arrested for impaired driving, based on data from four major U.S. forensic toxicology laboratories.
Yet even with these statistics, the cost and complexity of marijuana testing versus alcohol testing has caused a “tremendous data gap,” according to the NTSB’s transportation specialist Ryan Smith.
“The result is a patchwork of missing and inconsistent drugged driving data both across and within states,” Smith told The Center Square. “Even though we know cannabis is an impairing drug, the lack of data makes it difficult to measure the [road safety] effects of policy changes such as cannabis legalization.”
“Regardless of its legal status in any state, cannabis is an impairing substance that increases crash risk,” he added.
To further complicate matters, determining cannabis impairment is significantly harder than determining alcohol intoxication.
Unlike alcohol, THC builds up in the body’s fat reserves over time, with higher usage resulting in higher levels of the psychoactive chemical. A frequent user who hasn’t used marijuana in two days and is not impaired could still test positive, so adopting a standard THC impairment threshold is virtually impossible.
“There’s a reason that there’s some public misperceptions about this,” AAA FTS’ Steinbach said. “It’s not as straightforward as alcohol. It’s confusing even for experts.”
The American trucking industry in particular has had to grapple with the fallout of state-level legalization. Brenna Lyles, Senior Director of Safety Policy at the American Trucking Associations, told The Center Square that although the ATA has no formal position on marijuana legalization, “there’s some pretty far-reaching industry and highway safety impacts that we can’t turn a blind eye to.”
A major problem is workforce ignorance of the Department of Transportation’s ban on cannabis usage that all commercial drivers — no matter where they live or travel in the U.S. — are subject to.
“That’s really a communication issue between the employer and the driver,” Lyles said. “All commercial drivers are subject to a federal drug test — it doesn’t matter what state they’re in. But more and more states are legalizing, and basically you just end up with confusion.”
The situation could become much worse, however, if the Trump administration decides to reclassify marijuana as a Schedule III drug.
Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act, outlawing its possession or usage for any purpose. This places it on the U.S. Health and Human Services drug testing panel, which governs the DOT’s drug testing process for commercial drivers.
Under HHS Mandatory Guidelines, commercial transportation employers are only permitted to test their employees for Schedule I and II controlled substances. If marijuana becomes a Schedule III drug, those employers will no longer be able to test their drivers for cannabis use.
This change could lead to catastrophic consequences. Marijuana continues to be the most frequently detected drug among transportation industry workers subject to federal rules, with cannabinoids making up roughly 70% of all positives in the DOT’s Drug and Alcohol Clearinghouse database.
“At least with the state level legalization, employers still have the full right to test for marijuana,” Lyles said. “If it’s a Schedule III drug, it basically falls off the map unless there’s some kind of legislation or something to change that. So yeah, we’re concerned. We don’t want to see drivers high on the road.”
The NTSB has continuously warned Congress about the consequences of rescheduling marijuana.
“Transportation systems are among the most important ways in which the public may be exposed to risk from marijuana’s effects, and that transportation safety deserves prominence in the national conversation about marijuana rescheduling,” Smith told The Center Square, echoing previous NTSB testimony. “Marijuana impairment still poses serious safety risks, regardless of its classification.”
Steinbach, Lyles, and Smith all agreed that more public messaging about the dangers of driving high is needed, especially from trusted medical organizations.
“Because there are so many misperceptions, the key role for messaging is to get the word out there,” AAA’s Steinbach said. “Organizations like mine can bang the drum all we want, but we’re going to need to reach out more widely in order to actually get the message across so that people will listen.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
