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Wayne Hall in New York Times commentary
Thursday, 30 July 2009Professor Hall is one of a group of experts – including four professors and a former police chief – who commented on a New York Times article that discussed whether more and more potent types of cannabis are increasing incidences of addiction to the drug.
In his commentary, which appeared in the Times website on 21 July, Professor Hall cautioned that any effects of legalising or decriminalising marijuana would be determined by how this is defined.
“If we mean replacing imprisonment with a fine … then legalisation would have little effect on dependence,” he said.
“Evaluations of this policy in 11 U.S. states in the 1970s and 1980s found little or no effect on rates of use among adolescents and adults.”
Professor Hall says there is more debate about the effects of allowing a ‘de facto’ legal marijuana market, as the Netherlands has done since the 1980s.
“Marijuana use increased in the Netherlands in the 1990s, but this was also the case in the rest of Europe, and policy analysts disagree about whether rates of use increased faster in the Netherlands than elsewhere,” he points out.
Professor Halls says that the effects of completely legalising the use, growing and selling of marijuana are more speculative as no modern country has adopted this policy.
“It seems common sense that legalising marijuana use and sales would lead to more people using it regularly and this would probably mean more marijuana dependence,” he said.
Professor Hall points out that legalizing marijuana would allow governments to impose taxes on the drug, regulate its content, restrict sales to minors, include health warnings on packs and advise users on ways to reduce dependence.
“These possibilities make it difficult to predict the effect that a legal market would have on rates of marijuana dependence,” says Professor Hall.
Professor Hall argues that the debate to legalise marijuana must weigh concerns of dependence against the cost of current policy, including the unregulated access of minors to marijuana and the social and economic costs of a large marijuana drug market.
The full commentary of Professor Hall and other experts can be read here.
More information:
Professor Wayne Hall
w.hall@sph.uq.edu.au
Vanessa Mannix Coppard (Communications)
v.mannixcoppard@sph.uq.edu.au
T: 042 420 7771
New York Times
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