Testimony – Cannabis more dangerous than alcohol

TESTIMONY – CANNABIS MORE DANGEROUS THAN ALCOHOL 

In testimony to the Victorian Parliament’s Inquiry into the Use of Cannabis last Wednesday Drug Free Australia presented the most recent science on the harms of cannabis.

Mental Health Issues and Cannabis

Covered in the testimony was the 2019 Lancet study demonstrating that 30% of new psychosis diagnoses in London are caused by cannabis, with 50% in Amsterdam. With mental health being considered a central challenge for all Australian governments, cannabis users are more than one-third more likely to get depression. Cannabis users are 3.5 times more likely to attempt suicide than non-users. Cannabis also causes violence and aggression which in combination with psychosis has led to some of the most horrifying homicides worldwide as recorded in Alex Berensen’s 2020 book on cannabis, “Tell Your Children”. Women and children in women’s refuges around Australia constantly testify to the role of cannabis in the domestic violence that drove them from their homes. Cannabis is a significant part of our country’s mental health crisis.

Cannabis, Cancer, Autism and Birth Defects

Attention was also drawn to mechanisms by which cannabis causes mutations which in turn cause cancer and congenital diseases via changes in the body’s DNA, where studies have shown that cannabis literally shatters specific chromosomes, leaving the body’s DNA repair mechanisms to rearrange the DNA coding after such a catastrophic event. So-called Chromothripsis has been a mechanism awaiting conclusive observational data which has, since 2020, come from US and Canadian data showing that their sharply rising cannabis use in particular States that have legalised recreational and medical cannabis is causal for increasing rates of autism, correlated increases in 60-70% of pediatric cancers, as well as more than 38 birth defects in babies, with cannabis since being called the new Thalidomide.

Drug Free Australia pointed out that these conditions are not just due to pregnant women using cannabis, but likely also result from genetic changes in paternal DNA. Drug Free Australia has also sighted soon-to-be-published data on all increasing cancer types in the US, with a single cannabis cannabinoid (not THC) causing 12 cancers in adults as compared to 14 for Tobacco from the same dataset.

Cannabis legalisation sharply increases use and harms

Also presented was data showing that Colorado, which legalised cannabis in 2013, saw a 75% increase in cannabis use within four years as against a 43% increase for the rest of the US, which had a number of other States legalise cannabis in 2015 and 2017. Colorado saw roads deaths resulting from a cannabis-affected driver rise 250%, with cannabis-related hospitalisations up 300% and suicides up 300%.

When asked about Australian approval for cannabis legalisation being higher than disapproval, particularly when 80% of Australians do not give their approval to the regular use of cannabis, Drug Free Australia pointed out that persuasive arguments have been disseminated by the legalisation lobby saying that legalisation would rid society of criminal elements that sell illicit drugs. These arguments have now turned out to be erroneous misinformation – California legalised cannabis in 2017 but now the black market in illegal cannabis is more than double legal cannabis sales.

When asked whether cannabis is worse than alcohol, Drug Free Australia’s Research Director’s opinion was that cannabis combines the harms of alcohol, via intoxication, with the particulate harms of tobacco but with the added degree of serious genetic damage which will be passed to all future generations. The Parliamentary panel was then asked – if there has been a societal metaphorical wringing of hands over the unacceptable harms of the entrenched legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco, why would we seek to entrench a third legal drug with unacceptable harms?

A conviction is not harm

Drug Free Australia particularly challenged the assertion that a conviction for cannabis use was a ‘harm’ to the user that might outweigh the harms of cannabis as presented earlier in DFA testimony. Every cannabis user has around them a whole constellation of people – their partner, children, their children’s grandparents, siblings, friends, other road users, workmates, and the general community – unacceptably harmed by their use. If a conviction for shoplifting, which arguably causes far less harm than cannabis, is never positioned as harming the person who steals, neither can it be considered a harm to the user. Further, on the testimony of Kerryn Redpath, former drug user and DFA Board member, few Australians get convictions for just using cannabis.

Track records of prevention success – we already know exactly what to do

Evidence was presented of drug prevention programs in Iceland which reduced school cannabis use by 65% and Sweden which reduced school-age drug use, mostly cannabis, by 80%. Australia’s Tough on Drugs reduced all drug use in this country for every age-group by 39% between 1998 and 2007. Drug Free Australia concluded that there is strong evidence to show how drug use prevention can work and that there is no excuse for rising drug use in this country.