College Students More Likely To Smoke Pot and Drive

Freshman college students are substantially more likely to drive after smoking marijuana compared with drinking alcohol, according to a new study.

Cannabis use, which is becoming increasingly common as it is legalized in more states, is involved in 12 percent of fatal crashes involving 16- to 20-year-olds nationwide, Reuters reported.

While students are three-fold more likely to drink alcohol, less than 7 percent of the ones who drink who prone to drive afterward. In comparison, 31 percent of college freshman who smoked weed elected to drive, researchers found.

"That's a pretty high number and this is something we should be talking about," lead study author Jennifer Whitehill, a public health researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told Reuters.

"In the public health arena, we feel like we've had some great success with reducing driving after drinking over the last few decades and so one of the motives for the study was trying to see if there is anything we could learn from alcohol that could apply here," she said.

Published in JAMA Pediatrics, the study used telephone survey information from 315 freshman college students from two large universities in Wisconsin and Washington. According to the research findings, 20 percent of students had used marijuana and 65 percent drank alcohol.

But while fewer students had used cannabis, the study revealed that those who did were alarmingly likely to drive after imbibing.

Among freshmen who drank alcohol, 12 percent of men and 3 percent of women drove afterward; 21 percent of men and 12 percent of women rode in a car with a driver who had been drinking. With students who had used marijuana, 44 percent of men and 9 percent of women chose to drive, while 51 percent of men and 35 percent of women rode in cars with a driver who had partaken of the drug.

"[The study] shows that the rates of driving after using marijuana are similar or in fact exceeding rates of driving under the influence of alcohol, drinking and driving," Mark Asbridge, a community health and epidemiology researcher at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, told Reuters.