Anyone can smell the problem: weed and driving

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2025 (202 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s 5 a.m. on a recent Thursday, and a car is stopped at a traffic light on Route 90 at Ness. No light in the sky yet, the streets quiet, everyone waiting for the light to turn green. No cars on Ness.

In the lane to the left, a van is also stopped for the light. The driver unsleeves what is obviously a marijuana joint from its packaging, lights it with a cigarette lighter, draws in a deep lungful of smoke and holds it. It’s obvious what he’s doing — yet he makes no effort to hide it. The light changes, and different cars go different ways.

On McPhillips, walking the two long blocks from Selkirk to Logan, there are a legion of smells: the dry road dust, the sewer smell from manholes, the exhaust.

Under the railroad bridge, it’s the chicken-barn ammonia stench of the mounds of pigeon droppings from the nesting colony there.

But something else.

The smell of burning weed can make you turn around two or three times in those two blocks alone, certain that someone is walking close up behind you, smoking a joint. In reality, it’s marijuana smoke blowing out of passing cars.

It’s so regular that it stops even being a surprise.

So for the police to say that there’s a problem in Winnipeg with weed-smoking drivers, well, that’s a penetrating insight into the obvious.

For the last three months, the Winnipeg Police Service has been testing drivers for cannabis during a special enforcement campaign, and has found that a staggering 50 per cent of the drivers they’ve sampled have tested positive for recent cannabis use. The police pulled over 302 vehicles, tested 207 drivers, and 97 came back positive for recent use.

Now, there are some factors that make that particular statistic a little less startling: the police specifically targeted vehicles coming and going from marijuana sales outlets, so something of a captive audience. Given the numbers of miniature Fireball Cinnamon Whisky and tiny vodka bottles littering Manitoba Liqour outlet parking lots, a drinking-and-driving enforcement push at the exits to those establishments might show some startling numbers as well.

But all of that avoids the very real problem: an awful lot of Winnipeggers don’t seem to be connecting the dots that smoking weed and driving is also impaired driving, which is both illegal and dangerous, not only to the smoker, but to everyone else on the road.

And while an enforcement campaign like the one the WPS undertook is fine for highlighting how serious the problem is, it doesn’t do anything to address the problem. By the time people found out the police were doing the push, it was over.

That’s something the police understand as well: “Unfortunately, the enforcement component is not the end-all-be-all, there has to be that continued awareness campaign,” WPS Patrol Sgt. Stephane Fontaine said during a recent news conference. “I think it’s safe to say, at this point, that ‘don’t drink and drive’ is something that was hammered in multiple generations, and everyone at least should know that. We have some catching up to do when it comes to, ‘don’t drive high.’”

It’s clear, both from the police enforcement results and the just plain anecdotal experience of anyone with situational awareness and two working nostrils that there is too much weed being smoked on Winnipeg roads.

It’s neither safe nor acceptable, and the next step should be not only education, but perhaps a higher-profile process by police. Recent changes to police practices in many jurisdictions now see testing for drinking and driving as part of all traffic stops.

It’s high time for a process like that for weed-using drivers to combat other, more dangerous kinds of high times.