Health committee  I appreciate the evidence from Dr. Levy, from New York that a lot of the adolescents she deals with who have a substance use disorder in general may have used marijuana first, but that doesn't mean there's a causative relationship, nor does it mean that legalization.... And I kn

Health committee  Absolutely. In almost every case of substance use, you can identify something that's present. Often, it's ADHD—and I talk about ADHD because I've been diagnosed with it myself and I know a little bit about it. It could also be depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder,

Health committee  I just want to make a comment on your previous question about pregnancy. I think it's an important question. I think that from the medical point of view—and possibly the legislation can consider this—there should be a warning for pregnant women that since we don't know what the e

Health committee  That's just the rational thinking, I think, in the absence of good evidence. As to gateway drugs, the fact that somebody uses marijuana first and then goes on to use something else afterwards, or uses tobacco first and then goes on to use something else afterwards, does not mean

Health committee  Well, yes, I agree with you. In the United States, a presidential commission recently reported that every three weeks they suffer the equivalent of a 9/11 because of opiate overdoses, and yet the overall policies are not changing. There's a real contradiction between what's happe

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  This also pertains to the present discussion on marijuana and prevention. If Mr. Sessions is right, that those policies of telling people that drugs are bad and not to use them at any age work, why does the United States have five or 10 times as much heroin use as it did 10 years

Health committee  Well, I think there are two worlds: there's the world of reality and there's the world of politics. Somehow the two have to be conjoined. In the realm of politics, I totally understand why the government has taken the very rational step—and for the laudable purposes that you just

Health committee  Thank you for including me in this conversation. It's a pleasure to be here. I worked for 12 years in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, which I think is notorious throughout North America as the continent's most concentrated area of drug use; and right now I travel extensivel