Page 460 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 2019
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The earliest such study was a 15-year prospective investigation of cannabis use and schizophrenia in 50,465 Swedish conscripts. The study found that those who had tried cannabis by age 18 were 2.4 times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than those who had not.
It says, “The risk of this diagnosis increased with the frequency of cannabis use.” I tabled that report in full last week in the debate we were having, and I encouraged members to read it for their information.
To suggest, as Mr Rattenbury did, that the jury is out and that the evidence is not significant, and to ignore the warnings of the AMA in their submission on Mr Pettersson’s bill is, from the Minister for Mental Health, simply outrageous.
What compounds that is that we have the Greens out there campaigning with advertising material published by Mr Rattenbury saying, “Welcome to the party,” with a picture of young people sitting around, enjoying themselves, I imagine. That is a grossly irresponsible thing for the Minister for Mental Health to do when we have warnings from so many people, including the AMA, that the use of cannabis can cause a fivefold increase in psychosis. What is the response of Mr Rattenbury, the Minister for Mental Health? It is “Welcome to the party” as part of Greens advertising material.
People who point to the relatively limited harm of cannabis compared to legal products like alcohol and cigarettes need to acknowledge that a significant part of the reason is the lower rate of cannabis use because it is prohibited. The genie is out of the bottle on tobacco. Why do we want to go there with cannabis? Based on experience with alcohol and cigarettes, legalising cannabis will actually increase rates of harm.
The other argument being used for legalising cannabis is that people are being caught up in the criminal justice system and young lives are being permanently wrecked. That is just not true in the ACT. Under current law, small personal use is already decriminalised. We already have the most tolerant, progressive laws in the country. We support the existing laws. We must balance reasonable laws with reasonable protections, and the current laws do just that. They are reasonable and they are responsible. They strike the right balance.
There is a hodgepodge mess of laws before us that are going to be subject to a whole bunch of amendments. We are not even going to get through the in-principle debate on them today because we are still waiting for the amendments to be drafted or tabled. We have not even seen them yet. These laws, as they sit before us, are neither responsible nor reasonable. For example, there is little consideration that I can see of the very problematic issue of interaction with commonwealth laws. Section 109 of the constitution states that where a law of a state is inconsistent with the laws of the commonwealth, commonwealth laws will prevail and the state law will be invalid.
There is a clear conflict in the case of this bill. We received advice from the ACT Law Society. It says:
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