Colorado wants drivers on psychedelics to ‘plan your trip before you trip’
Colorado transportation officials, anticipating dangerous driving resulting from voters’ decriminalization of certain psychedelic drugs and the growing practice of microdosing, have launched a campaign to prevent driving under the influence: “Plan your trip before you trip.”
Estimating that as many as 5 million people, including 140,000 Coloradans, used psilocybin over the past year, the Colorado Department of Transportation and State Patrol officials announced they’ll team with facilitators at healing centers to encourage safe rides home. Colorado’s laws against driving under the influence of alcohol and cannabis also apply to natural psychedelics and synthetics such as LSD.
“With psilocybin growing in popularity, hundreds of thousands of people across America may now be microdosing,” CDOT spokeswoman Tamara Rollison said. “We know many of these people must be driving.”
As part of the campaign, state social media postings warn that users’ perceptions, reaction time, and decision-making can be altered for hours, advising would-be drivers to “plan your trip before you trip” and stating that “decriminalization doesn’t mean driveable.”
Psychedelics can lead to visual and auditory hallucinations, disordered 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 isn’t a model that we’re following, but there wasn’t one when Colorado legalized recreational cannabis either,” Rollison said. “We created that playbook, and we’re doing the same with psychedelics. It’s about applying established impaired-driving safety principles to a new policy environment.”
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