Good morning. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to speak. I have some brief prepared remarks and then I'd be happy to take any questions.
By way of introduction, I'm a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia. I hold a Canada research chair in inner city medicine. I am the medical director for addiction services at Vancouver Coastal Health and I'm an American Board of Addiction Medicine accredited addiction medicine physician.
Today I will summarize some of the health harms of cannabis at the individual and public health levels and hopefully offer some insight into how these harms can be mitigated.
In recent years research has concluded that cannabis can contribute to some health harms, although I think in many instances these have been overstated, and I'd be happy to talk about in which instances I think they have been. As previous presenters have noted, while these health harms are a matter for concern, especially among vulnerable populations, relatively speaking, the health harms of cannabis in terms of individual health are believed in the scientific literature and in the medical community to be less serious than those of tobacco and alcohol.
Most importantly, I should note that cannabis is one of the most commonly used, certainly the most commonly used illegal drug. Most users use it infrequently and with no obvious harms to themselves.
I really come to this issue from a conservative perspective with respect to government accountability and the need for impact assessment of taxpayer-funded interventions. As you are likely aware, despite more than an estimated $1 trillion spent in the last 40 years trying to suppress the drug market in general, cannabis remains freely available to young people in our society. In many respects it is more accessible to young people than alcohol and tobacco. There are statistics from various U.S. government-funded sources, including the Monitoring the Future study, that show that about 80% of young people find cannabis easy to obtain.
In recent decades, rates of cannabis use have climbed; cannabis potency has increased, and the price of cannabis has decreased. Despite our best efforts in public education and law enforcement, it's clear we've not been able to effectively curb cannabis supply and demand, and importantly, a violent unregulated market has filled the void to supply cannabis to consumers.
The Fraser Institute, an economic and public policy think tank, has estimated that the market for illegal cannabis in British Columbia may be as large as $7 billion per year. This is more than double the total revenue from the province's agricultural, forestry, and fishing sectors combined. The well-intentioned efforts to reduce the availability and use of cannabis by making it illegal, like alcohol prohibition before it, has had a range of unintended consequences in terms of its contribution to organized crime. It's important not to separate the cannabis market from other illegal industries. For instance, the RCMP has done a very nice job describing how the export market for cannabis to the United States contributes in a substantial way to the importation of cocaine and guns into Canada.
Economists considering this issue have helped me understand that this is just simply the laws of supply and demand; that is, any consequential intervention into the cannabis market that in any way reduces supply will have the perverse effect of driving up the price of cannabis and incentivizing new individuals to get into the marketplace. In light of the harms of cannabis use and the social harms of cannabis prohibition the question is: what should be done next?
It's commonly argued that rates of cannabis use would be higher if law enforcement measures such as these were not in place, which raises the question: should anti-cannabis provisions be strengthened? Importantly, the scientific evidence does not supply this approach. A survey of UN member states that looked at how aggressively anti-drug laws, including anti-cannabis laws, were enforced demonstrated that there's no association in per capita rates of use in relation to how aggressively anti-cannabis prohibition are enforced.
Quite the contrary, settings with softer laws with respect to cannabis, such as the Netherlands, where cannabis has been de facto legalized, are lower than in settings where anti-cannabis prohibitions are aggressively enforced, at least traditionally, such as the United States.
While you've already heard from other speakers that the cannabis available on our streets is more potent than ever before, it's important to note that this has happened despite escalating expenditures aimed at reducing the cannabis supply. Our best efforts to limit supply and demand have not been successful. As a result, cannabis is freely available throughout the country in an unregulated way and to the benefit of organized crime.
As a physician and researcher, I stand with leading public health bodies, including the Health Officers Council of British Columbia and the Canadian Public Health Association, which have argued that we should be looking at the taxation and strict regulation of adult cannabis use as the best way to wage economic war on organized crime, and certainly to have the potential to better protect young people from the free and easy availability of cannabis that exists under prohibition.
I'll stop there. I'm happy to answer any questions that members of the committee may have.