If U.S. policymakers want to better prioritize public health while legalizing cannabis, they should look to Canada's model for ideas, according to a n

When it comes to legal cannabis, Canada’s doing it right

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2022-01-12 17:30:13

If U.S. policymakers want to better prioritize public health while legalizing cannabis, they should look to Canada's model for ideas, according to a new research report funded by Stanford University.

Keith Humphreys, PhD, the Esther Ting Memorial Professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine, commissioned the report in his role as co-director of the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy, in an effort to more closely examine Canada's efforts to control marketing of the drug, its use of government-run cannabis retail stores and efforts to reduce youth access to better prevent harmful drug use.

I talked with Humphreys about the results of the study and how it could be useful in forming future policy in the United States.

The lessons we learned from regulating the tobacco industry have been forgotten in the legalization of cannabis, which has prioritized profit over public health. The potency of the drug is not capped, advertising is ubiquitous and sometimes dangerously fraudulent -- for example claiming that cannabis cures COVID-19 or heroin addiction -- and taxes are too low to cover the health and social harms the drug produces.

U.S. policymakers often ask the Stanford Network on Addiction Policy for models of cannabis legalization that prioritize public health, and we realized there aren't good examples domestically.