Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with the hon. member to strengthen Durham. We have a lot of good work ahead.
On the specific question he asked, the problem is that marijuana is already accessible to young people. As I said in my comments, for over 20% of young people there is a current prevalence rate of marijuana.
We can live in a pretend reality where we imagine that young people do not have access to it, where we imagine that is not the case, but the reality of the efforts for the last 10 years is a consistent increase in the prevalence rate for which this substance is smoked and utilized.
If there is an honest interest, and let us be clear about that, in actually reducing the prevalence of marijuana among young people, then the science is clear. The science is that, as it currently stands, it is far too easy for a young person to obtain the substance, that criminals do not care who they sell their product to, that the controls are utterly inadequate, and that the policies of the past have been an abject failure.
The reality is, when we look at where tobacco was, there was a prevalence rate of almost 50%. The policies around restriction, around ensuring young people did not have access, around going after public health campaigns to ensure that people understood the dangers of the substance they were dealing with, allowed that prevalence rate to be pulled from over 50% down to 9% for youth. That is pretty instructive.
If we set as an objective the reduction of the prevalence rate of marijuana to the prevalence rate of smoking, as a near-term target, and I do not suggest that is an end, then we would have accomplished much, but what has been accomplished to date is nothing but failure. If we want to make real change, let us do it.