Drug Free Australia and other members of the Australian Taskforce for Drug Prevention have called on the Greens to do their ‘homework’ before announcing policy positions on drugs. This is particularly the case with the current Greens’ call to legalise cannabis for recreational use.
Gary Christian, spokesperson for the Taskforce which incorporates five of Australia’s top drug prevention entities, says that the science on cannabis is now so damning that even the withdrawing of its medicinal use needs to be politically considered. “The science very recently confirmed that cannabis is causal in twice the number of cancers as tobacco, is causal in 70% of pediatric cancers, and that it is not only causal in 89 of 95 birth defects such as babies born without limbs, but also that the associated genetic mutations and epigenetic changes causing these conditions are being passed down to a cannabis user’s children, grandchildren and beyond, causing generational grief and harm.”
Cannabis has recently been found to accelerate aging in users by 11%, taking potential productive years off lives. This simply adds to the well-known mental health issues where a 2019 Lancet study calculated that 30% of new psychosis/schizophrenia diagnoses in London and 50% in Amsterdam were caused by cannabis. Further, the role of cannabis in suicide and violence, including domestic violence, is well established with strong evidence pointing to a role in homicide and even mass shootings in the US.
The Taskforce also points to the social harms caused by the legalisation of cannabis for recreational use. When Colorado legalised cannabis in 2013, cannabis use doubled within a two year period, causing a near doubling in cannabis-related hospitalisations and a 62% increase in drugged driving fatalities.
To the argument that legalising cannabis will put criminals out of business, a media release last week by US company Curaleaf announced it is closing down its cannabis operations in Colorado, California and Oregon, states where recreational cannabis use has been legalised, because they can’t compete with the illicit cannabis grows in those states.
“The science has advanced so greatly in the last couple of years that even the medicinal use of cannabis clearly now has harms that far-outweigh any benefits, and if any pharmaceutical drug was found to be doing that much damage it would be immediately pulled from the market.” said Mr Christian.
“For a political party to promote the recreational use of a substance with such gratuitous harm suggests a lack of due diligence by this political party.”
*Photo courtesy of the Dalgarno Institute: Dalgarno Institute Website - Cannabis Conundrum
