Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for your testimony.
Ms. Weeks, in particular, thank you to you. You're on a vacation in Hawaii and spending time with us in Ottawa. I think that's quite unique, so thank you very much for that.
I want to just say a quick piece here. In Canada we've had legalized medical marijuana now for over a decade. We're not new to this particular field. The government was clear during the election in 2015 that this would be a priority. In June 2016 a task force was launched. It met with doctors, lawyers, researchers, law enforcement, and multiple stakeholder groups in different jurisdictions.
There were 20,000 submissions to the expert task force that eventually, with those recommendations, came about to produce this legislation. The legislation is more conservative. We've heard both from the chair and the vice-chair and from others, that the legislation itself is more conservative than the recommendations that were brought forward from the task force. It was introduced in April, and we're here today. We still have nine months to the point when it would probably become legalized, so I think this has been a very careful, very thoughtful process.
We have a problem in Canada. As much as I keep hearing numbers from other members on the committee, the bottom line is that 21% of youth in Canada acknowledged using marijuana in the last year, and 30% of young adults said they used marijuana in the last year. A recent UNICEF study has Canada as the worst. These are children, 11-, 13-, and 15-year-olds, who reported using cannabis in the last 12 months. We're at the bottom of 29 nations. Our children are the heaviest users of marijuana among 29 industrialized nations, so we have to go somewhere with this.
Mr. Sabet, I was quite confused by your testimony. I heard you say what we know, that use of marijuana is not healthy for young people. There are uncertain longer-term psychiatric potential risks, but I don't know that they're proven yet. I heard you say, “Don't legalize it”, but then I heard you say, “Don't charge people for possession of it.”