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.