I have DEFINITELY noticed an increase in public usage yeah. Which is strange because that was not legalized in Ohio. Smoking a joint in your car going down the road or at the park is as illegal as it ever was.

I’m sure overall usage numbers are up because I know a lot of people who started using it after they could buy it legally, but those people are all also infrequent users and I’m sure are not driving high. The people who would be deterred by weed being illegal are probably all in the “won’t drive stoned” category. (I’m sure many infrequent users pre-legalization, myself included, were never much worried about the legality but don’t drive high because we like being alive, and we continue to not do so now.)

I've never smelled cannabis before in my life and don't know what it's supposed to smell like. I live in an area of the world where it's illegal and I guess not many people are smoking it. I may also have had a quite sheltered education.

This year, I went to British Columbia, and there was this weird scent everywhere that I could not describe. My wife said it was cannabis. I'm still not used to it so I don't know if I'll be able to recognize it next time I travel to North America.

I had never smelled it before. It smells identical to sewer gas to me—I know what that smells like because our house was missing several drain traps.

The first time I smelt weed it reminded me of a skunk.

I could see how that might be mistaken as sewage.

As somebody who has no problem whatsoever with weed, it smells like pus from a tooth infection to me.

I have had dental abscesses in the past that made my mouth taste like I was in a room full of cannabis smoke.

Living in proximity to people who don't care enough to not be annoying to others has a few ways you can look at it. But I suggest you consider upgrading the cabin air filter in your car. There are likely options with activated carbon to help reduce odors. This was actually a factor in my decision to go Tesla: their models S and X have an additional massive HEPA filter, and absolutely no outside smells make it into the car.

These horror-style anecdotes are hilarious echoes from decades past.

oh no, he had the reefer madness?

Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?

It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.

2. young people are worse drivers and more likely to use

The expected number seems to be about 20+% (depending on assumptions) so this is higher than expected but not drastically so.

Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.

Right, so it might just mean that reckless drivers are more likely to smoke weed.

It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.

The second seems eminently plausible with the correlation between driving skills and drug use both being due to higher risk tolerance.

You need to consider other confounding factors

It is well shown that age (youth) is a major factor in accident rates.

Not necessarily, they could both be a comorbidity of some other factor (bad decision making causes both, for instance) but it certainly doesn’t refute it.

The question then becomes "what level of impairment is tolerable".

Driving doesn't require perfect cognition, just good enough. If we went for perfect then anyone over 65 would be banned from operating a car.

And I think that's the hard thing with THC. Yes you may be impaired 24 hours later, but how impaired and how does that compare to age related impairment.