 Hi. Good morning, everybody. Let me try that again. Good morning. I hate when they do that, but I felt the need to do it while standing here. So my name is Scott Bernstein. I'm a senior policy analyst at the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, and I'm just going to take a brief moment before we start the plenary to talk about this card that we put on left on your seats. So our coalition is a national group of 70 or so organizations across Canada and several thousand individuals, and we're all advocating for changes in drug policy, and so we're the policy end of what happens. We work with governments to advocate on behalf of things like expansion of harm reduction, decriminalization, legal regulation of drugs, and the coalition is we invite you to join individually or as an organization, and if you'd like to do so, you can either do it online or fill out this card, drop it off at our booth downstairs. If you are joining as an organization, I would just ask that maybe you fill the organization's name on the back or something, and so I really hope you join. So great, I'm going to take a second here. The session is going to be bilingual, so Marilis gave you a little bit of warning if you need a headset for translation, please go grab that. Okay, so cannabis. So we have a great panel. We're actually expecting one more panel member and she just indicated she's running a bit late in social join sort of midstream, but I wanted to just say a little bit like I think we're all aware that on October 17th, which is really less than two weeks from now, Canada will be legalizing cannabis for non-medical, yeah, yeah. So non-medical and non-scientific use, which is often term recreational use, and so what happens then is Canada is going to be the first so-called developed country in the world and the only the second country to federally legalize cannabis. And so despite long-standing liberal cannabis policies in places like the Netherlands and statewide or smaller scale experiments that we've seen since 2012 in states like Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Oregon, California, Maine, Nevada, Massachusetts, Vermont, and in Washington, D.C., there's really no question that Canada is on the forefront of drug policy reform now with a legalization of recreational cannabis. So the history of cannabis prohibition in Canada dates back to about 1923 when its actual use in the country was actually pretty non-existent and most likely in response to international pressure, Canada added marijuana along with heroin and codeine to its list of scheduled substances and prohibited drugs under an act to prohibit the improper use of opium and other drugs. In reality, though, the first seizures of cannabis didn't happen until around the 1940s or the 30s and then between 1941 and 1961, really cannabis only accounted for 2% of all drug arrests in Canada. Flash forward to 2017 last year and we know that 53% of the 90,000 drug arrests in Canada were for cannabis-related offenses with 42% of all the drug arrests, a total of 38,498 just for possession. So we really have well documented the harms of criminalization of cannabis, including the stigma that's attached to criminalization, the lack of or the effect of having a criminal record on travel or employment opportunities, the racially targeted enforcement by police, which has a disparate effect on black, indigenous and young Canadians, and the costs of law enforcement are taking a lot of money that could be better spent on health, public health, harm reduction, other kinds of things. And so, and largely the fact that cannabis is prohibited in Canada fuels a thriving black market that's estimated around $6 billion. So it's, you know, those are some of the harms related to criminalization, but we know that public opinion changes and with cannabis, public opinion has really dramatically changed over the years, and now in polling there are 68% of Canadians support legalization of cannabis in some form. And so, following through on the campaign promise in 2015, the Liberals passed the Cannabis Act, Bill C's 45 in June of this year, and as I mentioned, it's going to take effect in a couple weeks on October 17th. We've seen also that the federal system that was created is actually quite general, and it's left a lot of the discretion for how cannabis will be sold to whom, what age, at the discretion of the provinces and the territories. And so what we're seeing is there's actually going to be 13 different cannabis systems unrolled in Canada in various stages of development. And so, the federal government cited three main reasons to legalize and regulate cannabis, better prevent youth from accessing cannabis, to displace the illegal cannabis market, and to protect public health and safety with product quality and safety requirements for cannabis. So, aside from the larger question of how is cannabis legalization going to unfold, there's a bigger point about what the legalization of cannabis means for drug policy in Canada, and also internationally. So in the face of an ongoing opioid crisis and increasingly vocal calls for the government to provide a safe supply of drugs, decriminalized possession of drugs, and legal regulate all drugs to bring them under control, the looming presence of cannabis legalization is important both logistically, how it's happening, but also symbolically. What does it mean for a country to go and regulate and legally control something that was prohibited? So this morning we're going to try to unpack the larger meaning of cannabis legalization for you within the Canadian drug policy movement. And, all right, Jenna's in the house. Come on up. It's great, I haven't started yet. So I'm really happy, we've pulled together an excellent panel of experts, and so I'm really happy to introduce them, so I'll go left or right, and Jenna's going to pop in right when I'm introducing her. I can start. You might need your translation stuff, too. It's right behind you. Yeah. So right next to me is Rebecca Hainsaw. She's a health sociologist in the medical school at the University of Calgary, just down the block, down province, and conducts qualitative and policy-focused research on youth and cannabis. Sitting next to her is Jean-Sebastien Fallou. He's an associate professor in the School of Psychoeducation at the University of Montreal and the editor of Drug Santé Société Journal. Drug Santé Société. Thank you. Sorry. His research interests include the etiology and prevention of problematic substance use among adolescents, as well as related drug policies. Sitting next to Jean-Sebastien is Steve Rolls. He's from the UK. He's a senior policy analyst for Transform Drug Policy Foundation. They're a UK-based think tank and charity focused on drug policy and law and reform. Steve is the lead author on a range of publications focusing on regulating drugs, including working as a technical coordinator for a recent Global Commission report on regulating drugs. He was an advisor to the Uruguayan government in developing their cannabis regulation model and also for our government in advising the task force on cannabis regulation. And last but certainly not least is Jenna Valeriani. She's a post-doctoral fellow at the BC Center on Substance Use with a qualitative and community-based research team. She's been researching cannabis access in Canada for seven years and her current work focuses on community-based cannabis substitution programs and the instrumental uses of cannabis among people who use drugs. So warm welcome. Thank you for joining. I'll stop speaking so much and now I'd like to get into a bit of discussion with our panelists. So, Rebecca, I'd like to start with you. The first question I want to say is just what do we think of the cannabis system that's unrolling? What are some of the things that you think are going to be done well or some of the things that we think maybe could have been done better and need some improvement? I think the thing that frustrates me at this point, I'm glad that municipalities on the ground have the capacity to adapt regulation to their context but I think we're seeing a bit of a patchwork and I think it's going to be very confusing to people to know when and where they can smoke cannabis or consume otherwise, edible or vape. And in my city of Calgary, we have an outright ban and some of the rationale for this that we've heard in the public health community is, well, now we've legalized cannabis but we have to keep it totally socially unacceptable and we have to not let anyone smoke in public because of what will model to young children. And I just think this is so counter-intuitive and advances stigma. In this very moment when we've legalized, we still have this intense idea that on October 17th, anyone who consumes cannabis is going to run out of their house and light up in front of an infant and blow smoke in people's faces. All of the people that I know that have been consuming cannabis all of these years have not done that and I don't think there's an appetite to do that, right? So this makes me very cynical and upset about the stigma that's still very prevalent and the assumptions in our public health community about who cannabis users are and what they will be doing post-legalization. So is there anything in the model that strikes as like, oh, that was done well or that was something that we think is on the right track? Well, I'm really happy about in the federal regulation and then what we've seen roll out across the provinces in terms of setting the age of access as low as possible at 18. We know that leading up to the federal legislation, there was lots of advocacy from health organizations, medical associations to set the age as high as 21 and 25. And I know Jenna and myself and other organizations and people representing, you said this is just totally counterintuitive when young people in the age ranges of 15 to 19 and 20 to 24 are the demographics with the highest rates of use. So if you shut people out of a legal market, you're diverting them to the illicit market and you're effectively have a drug policy that doesn't impact the main group of users. So why legalize at all, right? So Jeanne Spass, do you want to sort of ask you the same question? Like what's your general take on the cannabis? Before answering, I just want to say I can understand English and speak in English, but since we have translation and I better express myself in French, I'll answer in French, but I can take answers, questions in English. What's bad about legalization, which isn't really one, because it's still encoded by the criminal code, probably to better respect international conventions, there are a lot of things. The market relies on an oligopoly and excludes a lot of people who have been discriminated by the prohibition and who continue to be excluded from the legal market and it favors, by the way, the maintenance of an illegal market and it favors the maintenance of social injustices. In some cases, we have also empered the penalties, aggravated the penalties, for example, the maximum penalty of 14 years in prison for mining traffic, which includes giving a joint to a young person while for alcohol, it has no common measure. This too, I think it's good that we have been a little more in a public health orientation for cannabis against alcohol, but at the same time, I find that the discourse is completely incoherent. We stigmatize drug consumers even in legalization, cannabis consumers, and yet the discourse for alcohol is almost completely banalizing. What's good is that we talk a lot about prevention, but what's bad is that we don't do it quite well. Prevention is very complicated. The science of prevention is not intuition, and often prevention, up to here, is done to scare people and on political precepts rather than scientific and it's not effective at all. It can even nuke. The same thing for the reduction of defects. We send it, but it's not enough. And what I think is bad is marketing, the illegal market by the Trudeau government and even the governments all over the province. They don't explain to the population that we don't legalize cannabis because it's good for health, but because prohibition is much worse and far from it. And the nocivity, the toxicity of prohibition for our society, it was badly explained to the population. And that's why, in any case, in Quebec, we are the worst through the country in terms of acceptance, of legalization. There is a majority of Quebecois who are against the legalization of cannabis, and it has made flaws in the debate. We don't talk about the toxicity of prohibition at all and I think that was badly done. Yes, but also the prohibitionist discourse subject to legalization. I think that we stay in a logic, in the way we talk about it, we stay in a logic of prohibition, we stay in the stigmatization of cannabis consumption. And it goes just, more than in the discourse, it goes in the dispositions of the law also, which are very severe and even more severe than before in some cases, which can produce permanent effects. The new model in Canada seems overly restrictive in some ways. I think you have to bear in mind that this is a very new thing and we haven't even got to day one yet. And I think defaulting to a more restrictive model, I think there were political reasons for that to sort of counter some of the public concerns, some of the concerns from the opposition parties, some of the international concerns, and there were also practical considerations because there are things we don't know about regulating cannabis. And as we've seen with alcohol and tobacco, it's very hard once you have a sort of mature, entrenched commercialized market to try and row back if you feel it's under-regulated. So having an over-regulated market that then you can, that can then evolve based on evidence and maybe relax a bit, is actually I think a precautionary approach, but probably a sensible one from a practical public health perspective as well. And it's something that we did recommend, not because I want a super restrictive model and I don't think everything's perfect with the model. I think 80 or 90% of it's great. I think some of it is not so great, but there are things we don't know, they're going to make mistakes, but policy can evolve. We can look at what happens, what works and what doesn't work and we can adapt and policy can move forward. I think for example, the plain packaging is seen as too restrictive or there aren't enough sales outlets or the marketing controls are too strict. I mean, I saw today that they're not going to allow celebrity-endorsed branding of cannabis products. Now, from my mind, that's a great idea. I don't think you should have celebrity. I don't think you should have Rihanna branded weed. Sorry, it's kind of a Celine Dion branded weed, although I would buy those products if they were... I love Celine. She's so great. It's interesting for us. The point is, I think, erring on the side of caution as a starting point, not just nationally but internationally. I mean, yes, Uruguay has already done it, but it's a little country of 3 million. The maker is legalised for religious use. The Netherlands has had some informal coffee shop systems. But you know, Canada is pioneering on this front. It's a G7 country. And the eyes of the world are on Canada to make sure that they do a good... You know, it's really imperative that they don't mess this up. So being a bit more cautious on day one, for me, is not an inappropriate starting point. But we can chill and evolve as time goes on. May I react to that quickly? Sure. I agree, Steve, you have to be more cautious than me, but I think that in some cases, not everywhere, but in Quebec, and that's the worst, it's too severe. And we risk having a lot of perverse effects. But I agree, you have to be more cautious, but not too cautious like in Quebec. It's going to get worse with the chaos of power. With a new government, a majoritarian, a right-wing populist, who wants to ban in all public places, increase age at 21, we'll see. Okay, thanks. So Jenna, I wanted to ask you, just as long as we're slamming the cannabis, beating it down here in a moment, a little bit, except for Steve. He's jealous because he... I said something good. You said something good, too. So Jenna, I'm wondering, you've written before and advocated for the idea of amnesty for cannabis. And one of the critiques you had was that it wasn't part of the initial regulation that was proposed. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that would mean and why it's important to have that in some other social justice reparations. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll start with the recognition that legalizing cannabis in and of itself has a social justice lens to it. So not to hit that too hard, but also to think about what does it mean for the folks since we've talked about legalization in 2015 to now that have acquired possession charges for things that are going to be legal in two weeks. And also I think that this idea around reparations, around cannabis legalization, also extends into industry that we're creating to foster a kind of more diverse market. So I'm not talking about folks that have been running dispensaries illegally for 10 years, even though I think that there is a case to be made about facilitating their entry into the legal market, but more so around the communities that have been overpoliced for years and years. It still blows my mind that in Canada we don't actually collect race aggregated data around arrests. So I think that that's a really, really big problem and it makes it really hard to kind of nail it down. We recently wrote a commentary around this and some of the criticism that I got was you say that we're not collecting race aggregated data and then you make the claim that arrests around cannabis is disproportionate. So I think that there are some really big kind of holes in that argument and then if we narrow that lens down on young people, 18 to 25 in Canada have the highest number of drug related arrests and followed by young people 12 to 17 and over 80% of those are for cannabis possession alone. So what does that really mean in the context of legalization when we're introducing legislation and I mean it's monumental globally but I just I don't know what happens when we're not introducing measures in tandem to kind of deal with all of these folks that have like simple possession charges to start with. So I think that there are some really big and critical gaps that we need to address and this idea that we're not even going to look at amnesty until it's legalized to me seems a little bit problematic. Someone told me recently that there are people still have charges in Canada for being gay from like years and years ago and those have never been wiped and those are still you know things that we've never dealt with so I'm just wondering you know what the mechanisms look like to ensure that we can get there on a kind of a more integrative kind of social justice perspective on legalizing because this is kind of like the model that maybe could open up a conversation to you know regulation of other drugs so you know if we start doing that without actually addressing all of these kinds of really critical social justice issues I just find that a little bit problematic. Because underlying the whole rationale for why we need to legalize is largely that prohibition has been so bad and so it's about undoing some harm of it. There is some of the US state models have introduced Massachusetts is a really good example probably the best example so far they have a social equity program with their new cannabis law that's hardwired into the legislation whereby people who have former cannabis convictions and not only are they expunged but they are able to jump the queue in the licensing process to access sales or production in the in the new market and more than that or if and in fact there's also a sort of queue jumping advantage for poor areas that have been disproportionately impacted by cannabis enforcement and they have an outreach program and a training program so that people who want to participate from those areas can get training in marketing and horticulture and accountancy and all the rest of it so that they can participate on a more even playing field so these things are beginning to happen and some of the US models are really worth looking at in particular and some of the California some of the California models so it's a shame that Canada hasn't done that but I think it's not too late there's no reason why those programs could not be introduced at a federal or provincial level going forward I would also add that on the kind of business side and the idea of fostering a more inclusive market Health Canada has recognized this they introduced a navigator program so they have this program for some folks who are working with indigenous partners and it's kind of all it really is though is a direct line to Health Canada if you're an applicant I mean that's probably pretty valuable but I mean it still assumes a particular level of business acumen to like get to the point where folks would be applying so I mean we're starting to see some things kind of unfold but just I think there needs to be kind of more help to kind of get there so Rebecca I want to ask you as we move in you know and I think it's an experiment I think it's fair to say it's sort of a lot of unknowns about how legalization is going to work what do you think are the best ways that we've already people are already talking about evaluating how Canada's regulation is going to work and what do you think should be in place like what kinds of things do you think we need to look at in order to measure our success or failure yeah I think we are starting somewhat behind because we don't have the research infrastructure in place and we're just starting to roll out grants that will fund this type of work I think we need a critical mass of trainees and academics with experience in cannabis and we're a bit late on that side but we're getting there I think we definitely need coordination across municipalities within provinces and then across jurisdictions to look at what models are changing and what are not we have a wide variation and we have things rapidly changing as new governments come into power so I think we need that evidence on the ground you know I was kind of disheartened by the discourse around well you know in Ontario Rob Ford he knows how to regulate cannabis I don't think that we can say the Ontario government is really listening to evidence from drug policy I think they have other motivations for the decisions they're making and I think that's a great focus in place like we've done for other drug policy measures to see the success and failures and in particular the unintended consequences for communities that's one of the things that we always have prioritized some of us working in tobacco that we've rolled out regulations to ban tobacco of course but there's been unintended consequences around gender around other communities and that's really important that I think I'll let you put your helmet I think that in terms of indicators of success there's a lot of things that needs to go a lot more than just looking at the number of consumers but to see the frequency the quantity, the modes of consumption the way of consuming, the problems the negative consequences not just measuring how many people consume as if you change the impact on consumption the impact on the negative consequences because frankly the consumption as long as it's not related to the negative consequences, we don't care and you also have to look at the impacts in terms of improvement of all the negative consequences of prohibition in terms of insecurity health problems, criminalization injustice, stigmatization corruption environment human rights social justice all that, you have to look at the impacts on all of that because until here we evaluated the policies in terms of positive impacts on consumption without looking at the negative impacts which is completely wrong with everything that is done in political science normally we also look at unintended consequences as we said, the negative effects but except in the field of drugs we didn't look at that but we have to look at all of that I'd absolutely echo the comments we've heard so far I think that the Canadian model has got a pretty good evaluative monitoring system built into it I'm sure it could be better but it's probably globally it's probably the best we've seen in terms of cannabis policy monitoring and they've at least I think managed to get some baseline data before the legalization happens so you've got something to compare to again not as good as we might wish but there is something there one thing I think is worth flagging is the issue of how the market evolves in terms of corporate capture and I think that is something we need to keep a pretty close eye on there's obviously a real tension between the interests of profit making corporations and the interests of public health public health will seek to moderate use and minimize harm corporations are seeking to maximize profit which may well is likely to be based on increasing use there are these billion dollar corporate cannabis behemoths already in existence like Tweed and Tilray and I don't think they're evil or anything but I think we need to be careful that the policy making process as we go forward remains in the hands of the public health people and isn't captured by corporate lobbyists and we've seen real danger with that with Alcon Tobacco historically I don't disagree but one of the critiques of the system where you've already talked about the prohibition on certain branding and trademarking is one of the objectives is displacing what I would say is a very normalized and ingrained black market where people are used to buying at a certain price with a certain from certain dealers at certain qualities I think if companies are arguing well if we can't actually compete in that marketplace equally then that goal of displacing the black market may not happen for me it's about getting the balance right if your market's too restrictive you won't displace the black market because people won't want to use it if it's not restrictive enough to open the door to corporate marketing of cannabis as a lifestyle thing for young people in a way that may not be in the interest of public health and we have conflicting policy priorities here between reducing the black market and public health and it's about getting the balance right and there's no perfect answer which is why we come back to the monitoring and evaluation we need to see what's working and what's not and decide what our priorities are because often your policy priorities may be in conflict with each other and the black market versus public health is a classic example of that which we've had with tobacco as well whack up the price of tobacco and you dissuade use but you also encourage smuggling and undercutting so there's a delicate balancing act and we need to see what happens and base policy evolution on that evidence and the priorities the priorities of our society could in 10 or 15 years in a capitalist, neoliberal society and my fears are not one of the legalization in fact I don't have many fears but in 10 or 20 years we could see a big industry and a release of public health towards the goals of profitability in a society that prioritizes economy and economic growth first and foremost Actually just a quick response to that I actually just read something yesterday that the cannabis manufacturers were the largest lobbyists recently so they had the largest amount of interactions with the government in the last years like the large cannabis companies and so a lot of this is sort of I imagine it's getting their input on the system it's right but I'm thinking part of it is also advocating for loosens restrictions on and they bring money to the government contrary to public health people who cost money to the government and it's really interesting because right now we're seeing a really big advertising push come from the licensed producers kind of right before October 17th so they're kind of squeezing out all that they can kind of squeeze out before the regulations are introduced but just to quickly go back to the question around metrics one thing that I'm really interested in is around kind of looking at kind of the use of other substances and alcohol and tobacco and what can happen I think that we're seeing a lot of research talk about kind of cannabis substitution effects which is when people are either reducing or using in lieu of other substances so I think that could be really really interesting I don't think the mechanisms are like quite as well understood but I think you know I've heard someone ask you know will this result in kind of a public health net gain which is kind of like an interesting way to think about it so thinking around kind of keeping a track of on those metrics I think would be very important as well and I'm not trying to be too cynical about what we monitor and evaluate but as someone who works in the research world you know I've been advocating for proposals that come across my desk or other things that people ask for feedback on that we not only focus on cannabis harms right there will be harm then there will be benefits of legalizing at the public health level and also to the individual consumer in terms of their substance use mental health a whole range of factors so please let's not only focus on harms because we've always done that there will be benefits and we need to research those as well totally agree displacement from alcohol to cannabis for example so I'm wondering just to follow up what you know like as policy advocates and researchers we really believe that evidence policy should be evidence based and driven but I'm wondering what's the role of public opinion in crafting drug policy and I'm thinking largely beyond cannabis there's 68% support of public great the government can act for some of the other harder choices around things like legalizing or creating a regulated system of opioids to address the overdose crisis there may not be quite that public support for it yet so I'm wondering what do you think is the proper role for public consultation around specific ways that regulation is rolled out and also just action in the government anybody we just saw an example of what a poorly informed population can do in Quebec I'm a little cynical, disabused but unfortunately the population democracy works well when the population is educated, informed that there is total freedom and in the case of cannabis there is so much propaganda there are even medical bodies that say that and the information that is given to the population and even to the elected there are a lot of elected people who make very important decisions based on the information they take in the media and on a subject that they don't know in that context I think we need to do consultations but we need to explain to the population why we do things and to go forward to unpopular measures but that are favorable for public health for the common good, for social justice because frankly if we listen to the population there are things we wouldn't have done and there are things we would do that would be extremely harmful unfortunately it's a good case where the public opinion must be listened but we need to have political courage to go beyond what the population thinks public opinion public opinion it's important but I think more important is political leadership I think if you look at harm reduction historically a lot of harm reduction interventions when they were rolled out did not have popular support and often didn't have political support either it was civil society and activists who pushed these things forward proved they worked and then the support came later with cannabis it was kind of easy because you already had majority support for it so the politicians followed the support in Uruguay interestingly President Mejika pushed forward cannabis legalization and had about 30% support when he was asked why are you doing this he said because it's the right thing to do and it's kind of like what a weird idea that a leader would do something because it was the right thing to do and show leadership but now it has it's approaching 50% and there are many examples in the UK the tobacco smoking in public places in public buildings that did not have popular support when it was introduced and now it has overwhelming popular support again you had public health people making a case showing leadership and then the support comes afterwards so I think there's a critical thing here for wouldn't it be nice politicians could show leadership okay you've got legal cannabis here just to say we don't have legal cannabis in the UK 98% of the world doesn't have legal cannabis we don't even have medical cannabis in the UK so just be when you're belly aching about the new legislation just be grateful you can buy it in shops, you can get it online you can grow it in your garden that's a pretty good start it's expensive but moving forward cannabis is kind of easy in terms of the regulation debate relative to other drugs and you're absolutely right with drugs that have a lot more social stigma and social fear around them it's a much harder case to make and that's where we're going to need the leadership and that's where you need to push your leaders to just say look do we have to drag you forward on this the logic is the same can you show leadership and make this happen don't wait till the opinion polls don't wait till we sue you in the Supreme Court actually lead on this one it would be incredibly welcome change I just want to say but in between the politicians and the public there's the powerful stakeholder groups that represent public health and medical communities like the Canadian Medical Association the Canadian Psychiatric Association and Jean-Sabastien wrote this great op-ed it was in La Presse translated into English as cannabis legalization is making psychiatrists crazy and it wasn't a stigmatizing term when you say in French right and I think it's true this is what I've dealt with in the worlds that I walk in in the policy conversations I have is the pushback around protecting youth and protecting young brains when we legalize we're putting young people's and mental health and their future trajectories into successful employment in school education at risk and it's just a bunch of neoliberal claptrap right like as if cannabis is the one thing that's going to be the linchpin in a young marginalized persons trajectory right this is what I have been trying to fight against and other people you know this type of dialogue this is where we also need to work in the policy community to people who are very resistant to this change you know I wish people were as angry about poverty and trauma and violence and how that affects the developing brain not cannabis alone just to kind of echo what Rebecca said like in a space where you know I'm doing a lot of work with Canadian students for sensible drug policy helping them advocate for themselves we think that there's you know it becomes this like you know learning how to engage in advocacy with perhaps government bodies and with the public especially being able to kind of frame messaging in ways that are still you know received well that are palatable that makes sense has become kind of what we do we figure out ways that we can you know we can talk about the drug free kids Canada toolkit without totally blasting it but say you know it's missing harm reduction you know what are we offering young people that are already using cannabis those are toolkits like half a million of those have gone out across Canada and there's not even mention of you know any kind of actual you know harm reduction tips or tools for young people who are using cannabis and I always what's really stuck to me is when Rebecca had said to me once like I wish you know kind of these public like that public health messaging would stick as hard as the brain development stuff has has seems to have stuck and it just seems that you know no matter what you say no matter what evidence you present there was recently a meta analysis well a systematic review in JAMA psychiatry that reviewed all the available evidence on cognition and cannabis use and they I think it was about 70 studies that fit the criteria and they found that you know all of this discussion around cannabis use causing various impacts on brain development are of little to no clinical importance you know and that happened and that was out there and you kind of see that and you're like alright so finally that debate can kind of be laid to rest but it's as if it never happened that messaging is just too ingrained in how we talk about you think cannabis so I think a lot of it becomes strategy you know finding really you know helping young people being being able to you know get in front of Health Canada and talk about what their concerns are so yeah a strategy just a lot of strategy I just want to jump on that not only the guide for young people without drugs from Health Canada don't talk about reduction of my facts but in the end we give advice to parents on how to answer questions from teenagers and it goes to the last question where we say to a teenager who asks you if you have already consumed drugs from cannabis if you have already consumed to answer yes but it's only by a very big chance that I haven't had catastrophic consequences which is completely wrong and which is exactly what I was telling you earlier which is scientifically demonstrated as not only not effective but also because this discredits completely the prevention messages to young people and they don't listen to anything else thank you so I want to shift gears a little bit and talk a bit more like perspective like what does you know and maybe the answer is it doesn't like what does it mean for drug policy within Canada and also Steve maybe you can talk a bit about internationally what does it mean that Canada's legalizing cannabis in the big sphere of things for future changes in drug policy like I think we know now that our government has sort of closed the door on discussions around decriminalization or legalization of other drugs which is very frustrating and hopefully a temporary state that we can convince them is the wrong policy particularly in the face of overdose crisis and harms but you know at some point the discussion around regulating beyond cannabis is going to happen and I'm wondering you know is it important that we get cannabis right is it important does it set up certain practices or policy avenues that we will follow with evaluation or the system that we'll use to regulate that will be important I mean you know as someone who's not from Canada but is involved in the sort of international drug policy scene and does stuff at the UN it's worth emphasizing just how important the Canadian reforms are for the international debate and Canada to their great credit have been very clear and very strong in their statements in international forums and at the UN they haven't run away from it they've taken pride in it and made statements that have been very clear and they have you may be completely uninterested in this but the international treaty system which says that you can't legalize cannabis and Canada is now in non compliance with the treaties that it has ratified this is a big issue Canada is an important player at the UN and it's now in non compliance with one of the UN treaties which is a big deal but it's making a case explaining why it's doing it on the terms that you explain Scott and also beginning to make a case that the treaties are outdated and like the Canadian laws and like the drug laws in most countries need to be revisited and modernized and I can't emphasize how important that is for the international debate so aside from your logistics parochial concerns you know this is very particularly because Canada is a very important respected player on the international stage and is a member of the G7 and the Security Council it is very very significant internationally and you know you should take some pride in that that Canada has not run away from that and it is engaging actively on the international stage so I just wanted to, if you weren't aware of that I wanted to let you know it's very important Thanks Yes I'm very happy to see that because in 2008 before the economic crisis, before the appearance of the Global Commission on Drug Policy I never thought about the legalization of cannabis in my life and now I realize that we are perhaps also approaching to decriminalize and legalize other drugs which is very interesting on cannabis, the arguments for the legalization of cannabis are also applied for the legalization of other drugs maybe not all of them, we don't need all of them but almost all of them and the crisis also contributed effectively to a sense of urgency which even led the public health of the three largest cities Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver to take positions and to expressly ask the federal government to decriminalize what is still interesting There is also an international context with the Global Commission on Drug Policy with the last report which will even ask to regulate and frame all of the drugs There is the British Medical Journal you don't have cannabis legalized but you have the British Medical Journal who signed articles in the last 10th May of the Fianna God of the headless industry who said drugs should be legalized, regulated and taxed It's still the British Medical Journal I don't want to make an authority argument but it translates a consensus to some medical scientists and all of that The debate is between decriminalized or legalized by experts I think that decriminalization is not enough not only it is hypocritical but it is also fundamental of the negative consequences of prohibition, interdiction and decriminalization Stigmatization of consumers it doesn't regulate decriminalization it remains something forbidden and bad I don't have the time to develop but it has a lot of negative consequences especially the demand for help and social information control it doesn't control the quality decriminalization of products It's not enough money but the state is paying for the expenses so why this private money and create parallel economies that destabilize the illicit economies that create corruption and also the question of crime and criminal markets and the violence that is taking place all of that, decriminalization doesn't regulate it it should already be done we shouldn't criminalize no one who has drugs we will look at this in 50 years we will see the absurdity to penalize people who need help and help them more and to penalize people who don't have any problems and create them by imposing penalties I think we need to go to legalization and I think that all of that and I hope that we will continue despite the recent signature of Justin Trudeau of the renewal of the war on drugs of Trump probably in a political game to convince him of something else maybe Alina but that's it maybe somebody from the audience from our list we kind enough to do them do you want to go to the mic stand if you have a question there's a mic coming soon she has it right here she can hand it to you do you want me to ask it here do you want me to ask it right there I'm going to ask you a question in French so I'm going to put your helmets my question is quite simple it's more complicated what is your role for licensed producers in research and education would it be to donate from licensed producers or from a centralized fund from which we could do research and education thank you it's a very complex question in the best of the worlds research is totally independent but the financial research exists everywhere what is important is to have the independence of the researcher but it's not perfect we saw September 10th, 2011 November 11th of the World Trade Center the 11 biggest scientists in the medical field pharmaceutical, pharmaceutical now we want the researchers to publish what they want and say what they want when it's funded by the industry but the burden on the researchers' shoulders it's not perfect but it exists I think we need to do that but in the best of the worlds there would be common funds donations consortiums we would be interested in independent funds of administrative research but we can do the research in the meantime and it will always continue I think I agree with you I think research and public health education should be funded because it's the right thing to do it shouldn't be dependent on donations from industry or how much cannabis is being consumed thanks do you have a question I'm just wondering what your opinion is on the pending legalization and the fact that it's having on the medical community so for example in the province that I'm from you are going to be no longer able to medicate outside or you'll be facing a $50 to $2,000 per offense fine and the legal driving limit that's been set as 2 to 5 nanograms a medical patient who uses every day 12 times the amount in their system at all times so I'm just wondering what your opinion is on the legalization and all the different laws that are cropping up from that for the medical community so I'm just going to hit on the driving piece because I think that that's really interesting and we did a report with Canadians for fair access to medical cannabis that just kind of reviewed these considerations and the bottom line is there isn't actually a lot of research on medical cannabis use in driving and in fact it's actually showing it was a case study in Switzerland where they legalized cannabis that has a THC under 1% so predominantly CBD strains what they found was that even after consuming a CBD strain with less than 1% THC they were still testing over the 2 nanogram to 5 nanogram limit so I mean this raises very interesting concerns for physicians because in my experience physicians have actually would advise patients if you need to kind of drive during the day or continue your activities of daily living that you should be using CBD strains during the day and maybe more predominant THC strains at night so this new study really complicates that now because I was on a thread with physicians and they were all like for the last 5-10 years this is how we've been advising our patients but now we're not really sure what to do because they do have a big risk to criminalize medical cannabis patients for managing their symptoms. There's also a little bit of work with conditions such as MS that show and of course we could say that symptoms from conditions are impairing in and of themselves and that there may be a role that cannabis plays in helping drivers who suffer from conditions such as MS are actually less impaired after they've been able to medicate so I think it's a really really complicated picture. I think that there are some countries globally that have car votes for example for medical cannabis patients but it isn't quite clear how that's going to play out. I don't have more of a concrete answer but definitely recognizing that that's a really big issue and even when we're thinking about young people and driving rules there's a lot of provinces I know Quebec is no zero tolerance across the board not a zero tolerance for THC across the board in one system but Ontario is under 21 and for novice drivers and again there's something there if cannabis stays in our blood stream for up to 7 days and we have no actual indicators of impairment only presence of THC then I think there are some really important questions there. And these are probably going to be legally challenged I think with the will definitely. The link between blood content and impairment is very confusing with cannabis and it's not a good indicator in the way it is with alcohol so I think particularly the per se laws relating to blood THC content are generally not a good idea and it should be an impairment based system but that needs work but I just as a final comment on this the legal status of cannabis shouldn't really be a factor I mean if driving whilst impaired it should be not allowed whatever the legal status of a drug is so that shouldn't really I mean it's a complicated issue either way and we don't have blood tests or saliva tests for fatigue right so unfortunately we're out of time I see you there Erika but maybe folks if you have additional questions you can round up some of the panelists who are here at the conference and ask them after this but anyway thank you to the great panelists here who are really insightful and thank you for your attention