Sparked by a new national report on drugged driving, PennDOT's District 10 investigated similar statistics within its own five counties.

Jamie Arehart, the district's community relations coordinator, found that Butler County saw a slight dip in drug-related crashes in 2018, the department's most recent available data set.

In 2018, 3 percent of about 1,900 recorded crashes in Butler County were drug-related, or a total of about 54 crashes.

Arehart found that 2018 brought about a 0.5 percent decrease in drugged driving-related crashes compared to 2017 in Butler County. The same was true of Clarion County, but not the rest of the district.

“While Butler and Clarion counties saw decreases in drug-related or drugged driver crashes, Armstrong, Indiana and Jefferson counties saw increases, some of them significant,” Arehart said.

Read more in Friday's Butler Eagle.