The prospect of cannabis smoking and consumption lounges coming into Santa Cruz County has set certain corners of the community alight with worry about stoned drivers on local roads. 

These concerns have pervaded from the dais to the doctor’s office to the drop-off and pickup lines at local schools.

At the behest of the city council, Scotts Valley Mayor Derek Timm wrote a letter rejecting the county’s idea due to a perceived negative impact on public safety. Santa Cruz Dr. Donaldo Hernandez, former head of the California Medical Association, emphasized to county supervisors that there is still no intoxication metric available for cannabis users. And local moms such as Marcia Wilson and Katie Lage have urged the supervisors to reconsider their support in the name of safer roads for their children. 

Ahead of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors’ scheduled final vote on Tuesday to allow cannabis lounges, Lookout sought perspective from some of the local law enforcement leaders responsible for dealing with impaired drivers. While drunk drivers remain a priority, some local police officials said high drivers rarely pose a problem. 

Santa Cruz Police Department Lt. Wesley Morey, who oversees the patrol officers who deal with DUIs, said that arrests of people who drive high are a fraction of those caught drunk driving, and that the department didn’t see any sort of uptick after voters legalized recreational cannabis 2016. 

“I don’t think people are going out and getting so totally high and driving like they do with alcohol,” Morey said. “Not to say people aren’t smoking and driving, it just hasn’t been a thing for us.” 

Morey said the lack of a proper breathalyzer test “makes it tricky” for officers to confidently arrest someone for driving while high, and that officers often have to rely on judging their driving and field sobriety tests, but even that can be complicated. 

“These tests we do for sobriety are meant to test their judgment and reaction time,” Morey said. “We’ve found that with alcohol you can see impairment a lot more. If you’ve smoked marijuana, you can perform these tests easier than if you were drinking.” 

Since the 1950s, police have relied on breathalyzers, which measure ethanol content to help determine a person’s level of intoxication. With cannabis, officers still lack a legal limit similar to the .08% blood-alcohol content. And while cannabis tests do exist, it’s difficult to determine whether someone smoked a joint two hours ago or two weeks ago. 

Capitola Police Chief Sarah Ryan said Friday that she was “still formulating my thoughts on this,” but said law enforcement “can’t be hypocritical about” opposing cannabis lounges when bars have proliferated in local communities. Thinking about the impact on public safety, Ryan mused that she had “never fought with anyone high on weed, but drunk people can be pretty combative.” 

Ryan said that last year, her department handled only two cases that involved “cannabis-related driving impairment.” Ryan said patrol officers are typically hesitant to arrest someone for high driving without the proper training, or a reliable metric and standard like the breathalyzer and blood-alcohol content. 

“There’s a lot of complication in making the determination to take someone’s civil liberties away” on suspicion of driving while high, Ryan said. “Not every officer has the qualification to make that decision.”

The Capitola Police Department doesn’t employ any drug-recognition experts, or DREs, officers with specific training on how to determine whether a person is under the influence of drugs. The position hasn’t been a priority for Ryan or her department. However, if cannabis lounges begin cropping up in the county, Ryan said, “I’m thinking yeah, that does become a priority.” 

Lt. Grant Boles with the local arm of the California Highway Patrol, which oversees traffic enforcement on all county roads, and Capt. Scott Garner with the Scotts Valley Police Department have voiced  more concerns. Speaking with the board of supervisors on March 11, Boles said “predictable is preventable” and that the consumption lounges posed a “predictable public safety issue.”  

Garner pushed against the comparisons to the legalization of alcohol and bars. He said a more proper analogy would be if communities stopped enforcing blood-alcohol content limits, but continued allowing bars. 

“You would still have bars, you just wouldn’t have a way to test the legal limit” of intoxication, which he said was his department’s central complaint. “Until there is a reliable way to measure marijuana impairment, approving smoking lounges is premature.” 

The supervisors are scheduled to take a final vote on the issue Tuesday at 9 a.m.

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