U.S. Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) criticized the Biden administration’s planned move of cannabis to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) during comments Wednesday at a Senate Commerce subcommittee hearing, citing increases in vehicle injury and fatality rates that he attributed to the legalization of adult-use marijuana.
Delivering remarks to the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Surface Transportation, Maritime, Freight and Ports, Cruz brought up a number of transportation-related concerns before pivoting to marijuana legalization and federal rescheduling.
“Another notable issue is drugged driving,” he said, reading from a prepared statement. “A 2022 research paper found that from 2009 to 2019, legalization of recreational marijuana was ‘associated with a 6.5 percent increase in injury crash rates and a 2.3 percent increase in fatal crash rates.’”
“And yet the Biden administration, rather than working to keep our families safe on the roadways, has instead decreed that it will reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I substance to Schedule III,” he continued. “The American Trucking Association quickly followed this news with a letter highlighting that rescheduling marijuana without an explicit allowance for a test for its use would create confusion and result in ‘serious safety impacts to safety-sensitive industries.’”
Though little else of the hearing involved marijuana, a representative of the American Automobile Association (AAA) testified that a small proportion of drivers appeared to have increased their dangerous driving behavior during the past few years, including driving after recently consuming cannabis.
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