Thank you so much for your patience.
My name is Leslie Buckley, and I'm the chief of addictions at CAMH, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. I've been an addictions psychiatrist for many years, mostly focusing on women.
What I'm going to focus on today is the current landscape of substance use for young women and girls, and I will talk about why we need to worry about substance use and what we can do. I'll speak about these subjects separately.
I'll start with alcohol.
Alcohol is extremely important, because we know of the significant harms that are related, whether it's accidents from falls, head injuries, etc., or legal issues, violence, crime, drinking and driving, or its important role for young women in sexual assault. There is a double impact from substance or alcohol use by the perpetrator, which is more common. Also, sometimes they target women who are using substances. They are more often the victim in sexual assault in that context.
All of this, of course, is in addition to the chronic harms that we know about to the liver and the cardiac system, and more recent information highlighting the impact on cancer and elevated rates associated with alcohol. We know all of those chronic harms happen faster in women who are more vulnerable to alcohol.
In terms of trends, we've seen that over the last 20 years, there has been a slight reduction in alcohol use among youth. That is according to the OSDUHS, the Ontario student drug use and health survey that CAMH runs. What's interesting with alcohol, and cannabis as well, is that although we see boys decreasing their substance use, women have not decreased theirs to the same degree. What we're seeing is that they're meeting and we've diminished the gap between young women and young men.
At this point, I see that I'm two and a half minutes in, so I'm going to pass it over to Dr. Singla for her portion.