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.