LEGALIZED POT MEANS MORE ENFORCEMENT

Advocates of decriminalization or legalization of marijuana are
hallucinating if they think their vision would mean less law
enforcement, says renowned cannabis and psychosis expert Dr. David Fergusson.

"If you think about tobacco and alcohol, there are huge regulatory
behaviours and procedures that need to be put in place," the New
Zealand professor told a cannabis and mental-health seminar at Simon
Fraser University Harbourside yesterday.

Fegusson said a cannabis-legalization framework would have to deal
with a way to ensure product quality, advertising regulations,
package warnings/labeling, under-age prohibitions like those on
tobacco and alcohol, impaired driving/boating/flying standards,
smoking-in-public rules, criminal-code punishments, designated
growing and retail outlets and control of products entering Canada.

Increased research budgets would be needed to study long-term mental
and physical effects, as well as more health-care capacity to treat
psychosis or lung-damage cases, he said.

Fergusson said there is a clear connection between heavy marijuana
use -- at least one joint per day -- and psychosis. "We estimate if
all cannabis use was eliminated, probably in the region of 10 per
cent of psychosis cases would disappear," he said.

Benedikt Fischer, incoming head of an illicit-drug policy and
public-health unit at the University of Victoria, said the doubling
of Canada's marijuana users in the past 20 years shows the current
approach is "not very effective."