People enrolled in Massachusetts’ driver’s schooling program will obtain a brand new lesson beginning subsequent 12 months.
According to State House News Service, the Registry of Motor Autos, which oversees this system within the Bay State, “indicated Monday that’s adopting the AAA curriculum, which is named ‘Shifting Gears: The Blunt Reality About Marijuana and Driving,’ in partnership with members of the Hashish Management Fee.”
The outlet reports that the Registry of Motor Autos “plans a proper announcement on Friday on the Worcester Registry of Motor Autos,” and that it “indicated the curriculum can be adopted in January, and can replace the driving force schooling module to incorporate research-based info on hashish and an evidence of how tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the lively chemical in marijuana, impacts cognition, imaginative and prescient, response time, and notion of time and distance.”
Per local news station WCVB, this system will make Massachusetts “the primary state within the nation with authorized leisure marijuana so as to add classes about hashish impairment to driver’s teaching programs.”
“The present driver schooling module addressing impaired driving can be up to date to incorporate research-based info on hashish, explaining how tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the lively chemical in marijuana, impacts cognition, imaginative and prescient, response time, and notion of time and distance,” officers with the Massachusetts Division of Transportation mentioned, as quoted by WCVB.
In a statement quoted by State House News Service, the Registry of Motor Autos mentioned that subsequent 12 months’s driver’s schooling enrollees will symbolize “the primary era of driver schooling college students to be licensed since hashish turned authorized in Massachusetts, and AAA analysis exhibits that impaired driving crashes might improve and proceed to injure and kill motorists and their passengers.”
Such curricula will seemingly grow to be much more prevalent as extra states enter the period of legalization and finish prohibition on leisure pot use.
Final 12 months, Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, signaled that he needed to handle the issue of stoned driving within the state, which legalized weed in 2016.
Baker threw his help behind laws known as the “Trooper Thomas Clardy Legislation,” which bears the identify of the late Massachusetts State Trooper Thomas L. Clardy, who died whereas making a visitors cease in 2016 after his automobile was hit by a motorist who had THC in his blood.
“This laws goals to make the Commonwealth’s roads safer and save lives, and we’re grateful to the Clardy household for providing their household’s identify and help for this laws, which can assist us keep away from impaired driving incidents sooner or later,” Baker mentioned in an announcement on the time. “This invoice will present regulation enforcement officers with extra rigorous drug detection coaching and can strengthen the authorized course of by authorizing the courts to acknowledge that the lively ingredient in marijuana can and does impair motorists. The invoice attracts on considerate suggestions from a broad cross-section of stakeholders, and we look ahead to working with our legislative colleagues to go this invoice and make our roads safer.”
However the laws went up in smoke within the Massachusetts legislature earlier this 12 months after some Democratic lawmakers expressed concern over the reliability of the testing gadgets.
Officers in Virginia are presently contemplating their very own potential mechanisms to rein in the issue of marijuana-impaired driving, after the Commonwealth legalized leisure hashish use final 12 months, changing into the primary state within the U.S. south to take action.
And in New York, which legalized marijuana final 12 months and is presently getting ready to open its regulated weed retailers, officers are mentioned to be “scrambling” to discover a dependable marijuana DUI check.