Thank you very much for your testimony.
This is our last day of a full week of testimony on this bill from people in the industry and consumers from different walks of life. By the end of this week, we will have heard from 100 or more different witnesses. It's been excellent. If we had done this in our normal process, we would have been at it for about three months. This has really allowed us to delve deeply into the issues, and it's allowed us to compare and contrast testimony, which is often difficult to do when you have it stretched out so much.
When we come to clause-by-clause, I think the edibles will be the one that we're really reviewing. Right now, edibles are excluded from the legal definition of marijuana, so they wouldn't be permitted. I'm going to give you what I've heard in terms of the pros for including and the cons for excluding and ask you if there's anything I'm missing in this analysis.
On the positives for including edibles, I've heard it's public health: otherwise, we're encouraging smoking and ingesting of cannabis through smoking. Edibles give you a healthier alternative for ingesting cannabis. Second, what I've heard is that if we don't bring it into the legal market, it really does allow the black market or whatever market to really continue and to grow in that particular market space. I think Mr. Larsen spoke to that quite pointedly.
Those are the two reasons I've heard for inclusion.
On the reasons for excluding, I've heard that this is a social change, a social experiment for Canada, so go slow and see how what you have is working before you push on to a greater market. Kids' access and kids' accidental ingestion seems to be higher with edibles than with products that you need to smoke. Also, this is hard to regulate and hard to inspect. There's more complexity in edibles than in the more raw plant, although with the work they've done in Colorado, I think there are some pretty good and easily adapted regulations in place. The fourth point has been, “What the heck, it's easy to make at home, so if people want the edibles, they can go and get them.”
Those are the pros and the cons. I rambled through them quickly, so is there anything else you think I should know as we're thinking about the pros and cons of edibles? Is there anything you'd add to those lists?