States that legalized marijuana in 2016 saw meaningful declines in traffic fatalities during the years immediately following the policy change, according to a new study by Quartz Advisor. Takeaways were less clear, however, over a longer period of time that included years the report describes as “anomalies” nationwide.

Ultimately, the paper concludes, motor vehicle safety “should not be a significant concern for marijuana legalization initiatives,” especially when measured against alcohol.

“As of yet, studies have failed to show that legalization of cannabis has resulted in any significant increase in traffic fatalities in the places where it has been legalized,” it says. “However, the same cannot be said for alcohol, an intoxicant that remains legal, widely available, and deeply ingrained in our culture.”

In states that legalized marijuana, “traffic fatalities declined or remained the same in the three years that followed, compared to a slight increase in states where it remained illegal.”

The findings, which are not peer-reviewed, examined traffic fatality data from four states that legalized adult-use cannabis in 2016: California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada. Quartz Advisor then compared those states’ vehicle death rates to the national average as well as to rates in five states where marijuana remained illegal during that period: Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming.

In the three years following the change, the report says, none of the four legalized states saw an increase in traffic deaths. Most, in fact, saw declines.

“Three of four the four states saw a significant decrease in vehicle deaths over that span,” the paper says, “while the rate in Maine showed no change. Massachusetts saw the biggest drop, as rates fell 28.6 percent in the three years following legalization.”

Combined, the four states that legalized marijuana saw an 11.6 percent drop in traffic death rates from 2016 to 2019. That’s a sharper decline than the national average, which fell 10.6 percent over the same period.

That’s a far better outcome than in the five states the report examined where marijuana remained illegal, which together experienced a 1.7 percent increase in their combined traffic death rate from 2016 to 2019.

What might seem like a clear picture, however, gets muddier when researchers expanded the analysis to include data from 2020 and 2021, the most recent years for which National Safety Council (NSC) numbers were available. Over that period of time, the vehicle death rate in fact rose in states that legalized marijuana, although less than in the U.S. as a whole. The states where cannabis was illegal, meanwhile, saw vehicle fatality rates dip.

“Among the states that legalized marijuana in 2016, the vehicle death rate increased by 6.0 percent between 2016 and 2021,” the report says. “While this is an increase, it is slightly less of an increase than the national average, which saw a 6.2 percent increase in the traffic fatality rate over the same period. The vehicle death rate dropped by an average of 0.7 percent in the five states that have not legalized cannabis during this period.”

Why consider ignoring two entire years of data? The report explains:

“In many ways, 2020 and 2021 were anomalies, and this remains true in the vehicular accident trends. After decades of declining accident rates in the U.S., traffic fatalities picked up in 2020 and stayed high through 2021. The U.S. as a whole saw traffic fatality rates spike 18.9 percent from 2019 to 2021. States that legalized marijuana in 2016 saw a similar increase of 19.9 percent. States that have not legalized—and are notably more rural than ones that did—saw the vehicular death rate fall 2.3 percent over that period.”

“Because of this, we thought it was important to see what rates looked like with 2020 and 2021 removed from the data set,” it continues. “And it turns out, they look quite different.”

Quartz Advisor called the set of observations “interesting and nuanced—but ultimately limited.” So the publication talked to Judi Watters, public information and consumer outreach for the Maine Bureau of Insurance, who cited a Casualty Actuarial Society report from December 2022 that examined data from the U.S. and Canada from 2016 to 2019.

“The tests for the decriminalization effect on fatalities failed to detect a statistically significant change,” the 2022 report says about its U.S. findings. Similarly, the analysis “showed no statistically significant changes in the average cost per claim and claim frequency after marijuana legalization in Canada.”

A newly published study finds that people who practice yoga after consuming marijuana experience improved mindfulness and mysticality, indicating that setting and behavior may play an important role in modulating a person’s cannabis experience.

The paper, published as a University of British Columbia psychology dissertation, aimed to explore “the impact of contextual factors during cannabis use on well-being outcomes.” As author Sarah Elizabeth Ann Daniels wrote, such considerations are common in the realm of psychedelic therapy but less so when it comes to cannabis.

“When using other psychoactive drugs to treat mental health conditions, researchers pay particular attention to contextual factors beyond the direct drug effects, such as the mindset, setting, and behavior, as there is considerable evidence that these factors can significantly impact the therapeutic outcomes,” Daniels observed. “These factors are rarely considered during therapeutic cannabis use.”

The study’s results “generally indicate that what you do while you experience cannabis effects matters,” the paper concludes. “Mirroring psychedelics, this study supports the concept that set and setting during cannabis use may significantly impact the therapeutic benefit of the drug.”

To test whether context affected someone’s cannabis experience, Daniels had 47 participants self-administer cannabis twice, one week apart. During one session, they practiced yoga. During the other, they did whatever they’d normally do when high. The most common activities were eating, watching TV or movies, doing housework, socializing, and participating in hobbies.

Participants were scored on measures including “state mindfulness,” “mysticality of experience,” and “state affect.”

State mindfulness measured “both traditional Buddhist and contemporary psychology models of mindfulnesses,” including awareness of both mental states and bodily sensations. Mystical experience, meanwhile, referred to feelings of experiencing eternity or the infinite, a sense of peace and tranquility, or a loss of one’s usual perception of time.

Daniels found significant improvements in respondents’ reported mindfulness when they practiced yoga with cannabis. Their mysticality of experience was also greater, even though Daniels acknowledges that mysticality is more traditionally associated with psychedelic substances. “While cannabis is not considered a traditional psychedelic,” she writes, “recent evidence indicates that it shares many commonalities with psychedelic-induced altered states.”

As for state affect—essentially one’s emotion and mood—no significant difference emerged between yoga and non-yoga sessions.

Studying the impact of set, setting, and other variables the paper refers to as “extra-pharmacological factors” is crucial to understanding the therapeutic potential of cannabis, Daniels writes, noting that accounting for such factors helped clarify early research about psychedelics.

“Much like studies of cannabis today, studies of psychedelics in the 1960s were producing wildly variable results,” the report says. “Researchers at the time began to explore and document the impact of set and setting on the subjective drug effects, and how outcomes could be influenced by extra-pharmacological factors became a crucial consideration in studies of the effects of psychedelics and psychedelic psychotherapy. Indeed, once set and setting was attended to, recorded psychedelic experiences shifted from overwhelmingly negative to overwhelmingly positive.”

Seventy-two percent of participants (34) said they’d mix cannabis and yoga again. Not only did yoga seem to make their cannabis experience better, but cannabis also seemed to enhance their enjoyment of their yoga practice:

“The most frequently reported theme was enhanced physical awareness (n = 15), which captured an increased awareness of the body, movement, and physical sensory experiences. For example, participants reported they were more ‘in touch’ or ‘in tune’ with their body and their body’s needs, and felt their body, sensations, and sense of movement on a ‘deeper’ level. They particularly emphasized that this was different from their usual (sober) experience of yoga, stretching, or physical activity and that this experience represented a gain or a change from their experiences without cannabis.”

Six participants had never practiced yoga before, while 30 said they practiced “rarely or sometimes.” Another 11 said they did yoga often or very often.

“These findings suggest that paying attention to contextual factors and providing guidelines for therapeutic cannabis users may improve clinical outcomes when using cannabis to support mental health and well-being,” Daniels wrote.

The results could have implications for how to best tap into cannabis’s potential benefits—or even avoid potential risks. “Physicians have long described a knowledge gap pertaining to best practices when prescribing cannabis for therapeutic purposes,” the report says. “Providing specific behavioral directions as well as psychoeducation on the role of set and setting may stand to maximize benefits and minimize harms of therapeutic cannabis use. Based on the high degree of acceptability of the yoga intervention, yoga or similar mindful movement may be a useful recommendation.”

Daniels also suggested that the feeling of being “high” shouldn’t be discounted among researchers seeking to understand how cannabis works.

“A typical trend in the pharmaceutical field when developing medications based off of traditional psychoactive plant medicines (i.e., cannabis, psychedelics) is to seek to remove the psychoactive effects. The focus is often on a biological mechanism while the ‘high’ is seen as an undesired side effect,” the study says. “The results of the current study provide more evidence to support the intrinsic therapeutic value found in the altered states of consciousness occasioned by such psychoactive drugs.”

The U.S. government itself has named the consciousness-altering potential of psychedelics as one of their major side effects. A $27-million project announced in 2020 by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for example, was intended to work toward the development of pharmaceuticals that worked similarly to psychedelics but without “significant side effects, including hallucination.”

Pairing marijuana and yoga, meanwhile, is nothing new in the cannabis community. Classes combining the two have been around since at least the early years of state-level legalization, and likely much longer. However, the reported benefits of those activities have been mostly anecdotal.

Back in 2018, U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) even recommended marijuana and yoga (done separately, however) as alternatives to opioids. “Marijuana, yoga, all kinds of other things that are homeopathic but are not addictive in this dangerous way,” she said.

This article originally appeared on Marijuana Moment.

How do you get as high as possible? It’s an age-old question that has consumed weed smokers, growers, researchers, scientists, and anyone who’s ever put some kind bud to their lips since humans first discovered the plant. 

Recently, a study came out on the best way to roll a joint and get the highest concentration of cannabinoids. We’ve read, questioned, and tested it to see if there’s any validity to the study’s findings.

What is the best way to roll a joint?

You’d think that reaching certain degrees of high is a numbers game around buying weed with the highest percentage of THC possible — but it’s not. Scientists reported in a study by Scientific American that, with joints, how high you get is largely defined by how the joint was engineered, from how the weed was broken down and rolled to how the joint burns.

They broke the weed down by different weed particle sizes and hand-rolled the joints to test it. Then, they measured what percentage of cannabinoids reached the end user’s lips and bloodstream. The results alleged that the quality of a joint and getting the most cannabinoids and compounds per puff is about the size of the weed particles after grinding them, the roll quality, and how evenly the final product burns. 

The study was headed by Markus Roggen, president and chief science officer of Delic Labs, a cannabis and psilocybin research facility in Vancouver, British Columbia. Roggen and his colleagues questioned whether cannabinoid concentration was the most important factor in determining cannabis’s intoxicating effects and what other factors contribute to an enjoyable experience.

The team of scientists crafted a study where a smoke machine puffed on three pre-rolled paper cones in the same capacity and then measured the volume of cannabis compounds that were delivered. They used a coffee grinder and sieve to grind the cannabis and then hand-rolled the joints. The samples had weed particles that were one millimeter, three millimeters, and five millimeters in diameter. 

They made joints from half-gram samples of each and used a “smoke cycle simulator” that inhaled six times for three seconds before exhaling. Filters collected the aerosols at the machine’s 3D-printed mouthpiece, and the researchers used analytical chemistry techniques to measure aerosol levels from puffs taken at the beginning, middle, and end of each joint. 

How did we roll the “best” joints possible?

I used this chart to determine what kind of sieve to purchase to get the particle size right. Then I hit Amazon for the cops:

Note: smoking by particle size requires way too much work, and I know you aren’t going to put that effort in. But we did, ya know, for science. However, human trial and error greatly affects variable results in this experiment.

Before testing, I knew the best time to smoke would be in the morning while I was completely sober, so I spaced the samples out between Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. The original study agreed that a human volunteer could not assess this many samples back-to-back with accurate results.

Step 1

I used a red Solo cup and a basic kitchen scale to weigh 0.5-gram samples of LA Cherry Runtz from Flight Path. I rubbed them against the sieves to break down the weed.

Step 2

I hand-rolled the samples into 1.4-inch OCB Virgin Cones. 

Step 3

I inhaled. 

During the smoke, I hit each joint six times for three “Mississippis” — the true way to count seconds, just as the study suggested. I jotted my journey over the following three hours to remember and compare the feelings.

Results

Ultimately, I know what you’re wondering: Could I really tell the difference between the highs based on particle size? Unfortunately, no, I could not. I just got high like any other time I’ve smoked a lil’ half-grammer. 

When using different sieves for different particle sizes, I did not detect a higher high between a joint rolled with 1mm and 5mm particles. Perhaps some sort of monitor would have suggested differently, but if we’re going off of a human test and human feelings, it simply wasn’t there.

What does this study mean for the future of joints?

As of right now, nothing. Weed companies are not about to start marketing products based on particle size in a world where they are still fighting the THC percentage and indica vs sativa vs hybrid battles. But the information is still nice to know. 

Amber Wise, scientific director of the cannabis testing lab Medicine Creek Analytics, said, “Roggen’s data supports the argument that THC percentage matters less than particle size, and pre-roll manufacturers will find this useful.” According to Scientific American, the study concluded that further progress would require addressing variability that persisted in the team’s measurements — even between identically prepared joints. 

In future work, Roggen and his colleagues plan to examine how other factors, including humidity, combustion source, and packing density, influence a joint’s architecture and effects. We’ll be around to test those findings, too.