Colorado transportation officials, anticipating driving dangers resulting from voter decriminalization of certain psychedelic drugs and the increasing practice of microdosing, have launched a campaign to discourage driving under the influence: “Plan your trip before you travel.”
Estimating as many as 5 million people, including 140,000 Coloradans, used psilocybin over the past year, Colorado Department of Transportation and State Patrol officials announced they would work with facilitators at healing centers to encourage safe passage home. Colorado laws against driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana also apply to natural and synthetic psychedelics such as LSD.
“With the growing popularity of psilocybin, hundreds of thousands of people across America may now be microdosing,” said CDOT spokesperson Tamara Rollison. “We know many of these people will be driving.”
As part of the campaign, government social media posts warned that user perception, reaction times and decision-making could be altered by hours, and advised prospective drivers to “plan the journey before taking the trip” and stated that “decriminalization does not mean drivability.”
Psychedelics can cause visual and auditory hallucinations, impaired thinking, loss of muscle control, and “seeing colors and hearing sounds that are not real” – potentially impairing a driver’s ability to operate a vehicle, according to state campaign materials.
“There’s no model that we follow, but there’s no model where Colorado also legalizes recreational marijuana,” Rollison said. “We created those guidelines, and we did the same thing with psychedelics. It’s about applying safety principles for people with disabilities in a new policy environment.”
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