No, I'm not saying “always”.
Evidence of meeting #65 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cannabis.
A video is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #65 for Health in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was cannabis.
A video is available from Parliament.
5:45 p.m.
Liberal
Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB
I thought I heard the word “always”.
5:45 p.m.
President, Smart Approaches to Marijuana
Okay. It's probably my fault there, so I'll retract “always”.
5:45 p.m.
Liberal
Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB
Okay. We had clear testimony that, in fact, due to the economies of scale of a legal market that did not have to worry about the fact that they could be shut down for operating illegally, they were able to significantly undercut the price.
Mr. Freedman, would you agree that's the experience in Colorado?
5:45 p.m.
Director, Freedman and Koski Inc.
Yes, I think the economics of this are such that, barring extreme taxation or a regulation that makes a normal consumer feel like they are missing out on a variety that they prefer—especially over time and as people create different behaviour patterns—we've seen very quickly that we've captured at least 70% of the market. I think that when new data comes out, you'll find that it is closer to 90% to 95% of the internal market in Colorado that is now in the regulated system, not in the black market system.
5:45 p.m.
Liberal
Doug Eyolfson Liberal Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB
Thank you. That's quite helpful.
Dr. Sabet, you said that if we legalize this and once it's entrenched, how do we reverse it? With alcohol, we couldn't reverse it. Tobacco is there and we couldn't reverse it.
Given the prevalence of cannabis in society today in both the United States and Canada, would you not agree with the argument that it's already so entrenched that we're never going to reverse this?
5:45 p.m.
President, Smart Approaches to Marijuana
Cannabis is accessible, it's available, and it's already normalized. Both sides of the aisle, in my mind, are right on this. You're both correct. Cannabis use has fallen dramatically in Canada over the last 20 years, but it's still the number one or two country in the world for use. It sort of depends on how you look at the half-glass of water being full or empty.
Absolutely, there will always be people using cannabis, and it will be prevalent, but when there are ways the law and society can either encourage use or discourage use, my argument would be, let's discourage use, especially among young people. I think that's hard to do when cannabis becomes essentially a badge of adulthood, it becomes normalized, and it becomes like what we have with alcohol.
With tobacco we have seen a reduction in use, when tobacco is legal. That's an interesting case, because it sort of counters what I'm saying. With alcohol, we see way more people drinking than using cannabis. Many more young people are drinking than are using cannabis in the general population, but with tobacco, in the United States and in Canada, among certain age groups, we've seen a reversal.
More kids are smoking cannabis than are smoking tobacco. Is that because tobacco is legal? I don't think so. Tobacco has been legal for this generation's lifetime. It wasn't that it was illegal and then it became legal so use went down. No, use of tobacco went down because we had a societal shift that has been going on for the last couple of decades. As a society, we said that there is no debate. This is not good. We want to discourage use. If you come in here and say that it's good for you, or it's medicine, or it cures cancer and opioid addiction, you'll be laughed out of the room. As a society, we've made that determination, so we have been able to reduce tobacco use even in legality.
I worry, with cannabis, whether it's legal or not, that we are in the reverse, culturally, of where we are with tobacco. We're at a point where kids think it's medicinal. By the way, on the medicinal side, just for the record, there are medicinal applications of cannabis, just like there are medicinal applications for opium. We don't smoke opium to get the effects of morphine. I don't think we need to smoke cannabis to get its potential medical effects. In my mind, we should treat it like every other pharmaceutical drug. We should derive what's important from it and give it in a safe dose.
The point is that we're far away from that with cannabis, with young people thinking that it's harmless. I don't think young people think it's harmless because it's illegal. I think young people think it's harmless because we haven't, as a society, delivered in an evidence-based fashion science-based messages in multiple sectors of society. Sometimes we've gone way overboard, certainly in the U.S. I think that if you tried that first and you tried to make it not normal, as for tobacco, you may see some positive results. Actually, I do worry that if you legitimize cannabis we are now going to make smoking, which is so out of vogue for young people, back in vogue. Is there evidence now in some places where smoking of tobacco may be taken up more than it was because of cannabis? I don't know, but it's something I think we should look at and be worried about.
5:50 p.m.
NDP
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
Mr. Freedman, you mentioned in your original testimony that it was critical and important for us to collect public health data. I'm just wondering if you could flesh it out for us. What kinds of data would you recommend we set out to gather from the beginning?
5:50 p.m.
Director, Freedman and Koski Inc.
Thank you.
I think public health survey data is lacking in types of marijuana used, frequency of use, potency of use, and times of use. We get back good youth data every two years, but we should be getting that back in a much more timely fashion. The public health data is simply year-long. “Have you used in the last year? Have you used in your lifetime? Have you used in the last 30 days?” I would argue that this is not the problematic use we're trying to stop, especially among adult users, where we really are talking about cannabis use and functional impairment. We should be working harder to drill down into that in our public health survey data. That, however, will always be rear-looking, because when you take surveys, it just always takes a while.
Going forward, one of the things we weren't tracking in schools was marijuana-related suspensions and expulsions. I think if we had been tracking that ahead of time and had baseline data, we also could have seen how availability in schools is shifting. What we did see was that drug-related suspensions went up after medical but did not go up after recreational. For the life of me, I cannot tell you why. It's data that we wish we had better information on, particularly because at that time, total suspensions were dropping under medical, and then total suspensions were going up under recreational.
We have messy data. There are no two ways about it. There are about a hundred of those things I would change going forward. I would also be tying all of that to your seed-to-sale tracking system so that you can tell, in real time, where the problems are coming and what the consumption patterns are in those neighbourhoods.
5:50 p.m.
NDP
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
If you feel like doing this after your testimony ends, if you want to send the committee a detailed list of things that would be helpful to track, that would be really useful for us.
5:50 p.m.
NDP
Don Davies NDP Vancouver Kingsway, BC
Thank you.
Ms. Weeks, quickly, one thing we haven't really heard much about from people is treatment. Regardless of a person's feelings about cannabis and whether we should legalize it or not or what the proper policy approach should be, there's no question that it is a mind-altering substance, and like any drug, has the potential to create a substance-use disorder.
What was Washington's experience with investing in treatment? I guess a sub-question with that would be that I'm predicating that on the supposition that marijuana use, cannabis use, went up in the general population, but I'm not sure it did. First of all, has cannabis use gone up in the general population in Washington State since legalization? Second, what has been Washington State's investment in substance-use disorder treatment for marijuana?
5:55 p.m.
Government Relations Director, Washington State Department of Health
Since legalization, use has gone up for adults. It has not gone up for children, so those numbers have stayed the same. Much as in the initiative a certain percentage of tax revenue was given to the Department of Health for education, another percentage was given to a sister agency for treatment, so they have been using the dollars they receive to provide treatment.
We do know that for children, marijuana is the number one cause of a child entering substance-abuse treatment. The number of adults entering treatment for marijuana has declined since legalization.
5:55 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Bill Casey
Thanks very much.
I just want to say thanks on behalf of the committee. You've all provided really good information and different perspectives. I especially want to thank our video conference guests, because it's not easy to be out there by yourselves, and especially if you're on vacation, to take the time to do that.
Chief Vasquez, I know you've taken a lot of time to listen to us. We're here in a room with other people, so it's a little easier for us.
I also want to thank our guests who took the time to come here. You've given us the value of your experience, which there's no way we could get any other way. Thanks very much.
We'll see you tomorrow morning. The meeting is adjourned.