I write to correct misrepresentations of my views by Alex Wodak in yesterday’s Crikey (this was a subscriber only story, Supporting cannabis law reform without inhaling).
I support the removal of criminal penalties for possession and use of cannabis because this removes criminal sanctions for behaviour that largely harms self and the evidence (including papers that I have published) indicates that this policy change has little, if any, impact on rates of cannabis use.
But decriminalizing cannabis use is very different from allowing a legally regulated cannabis market, as is advocated by Alex Wodak. The latter policy is much more likely to increase use because it will make cannabis more widely available, at a cheaper price (in order to undercut the black market price), with the implicit social approval of use being legal, while allowing a legal industry to promote its use (regardless of any bans on advertising). Alex Wodak accepts that freer availability of cheaper alcohol increases its use and harm but for some unexplained reason he simply asserts that the same will not happen with cannabis policy.
Cannabis use increased in the Netherlands and adolescents begun to use at an earlier age after coffee shops were allowed to sell cannabis. One can debate whether use may have increased in the Netherlands in any case (as Alex Wodak would no doubt note happened in Australia over the same period) or whether it has increased at a faster rate in the Netherlands than elsewhere in Europe (as some drug policy analysts have argued). Honesty requires, however, an acknowledgment that cannabis use has increased in the Netherlands.
The arguments in favour of a heavily regulated legal cannabis market were sympathetically discussed in a book I co-wrote with Rosalie Pacula (Cannabis Use and Dependence: Public Health and Public Policy. Cambridge University Press, 2003). And I have argued elsewhere that if we were to legalise cannabis a heavily regulated government monopoly would be preferable to a legal market like that for alcohol. But I have never been as convinced as Alex Wodak is that a heavily regulated legal market will eliminate the black market without increasing rates of use or problems related to cannabis use. Perhaps Alex Wodak believes that increased cannabis use is not worth worrying about, as the absence of any discussion of cannabis related harms in his article might be taken to imply.
Alex Wodak concludes with the confident assertion that a legal cannabis market “will surely be less costly to the community and less harmful to cannabis consumers than leaving the market to criminals and corrupt police” (my italics). It would be nice to be as confident of anything as Alex Wodak seems to be of this policy outcome.
Over to you, Crikey readers. Do you think Australia needs to consider decriminalising or legalising cannabis?