Stuff co.nz 8 March 2021
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decision not to reveal her position on the cannabis debate during election campaigning could have been a “decisive factor” in last year’s referendum, academics believe.

Ardern and her Labour Party did not take a public stance on the legalisation of cannabis during 2020’s election campaign, despite facing repeated questions over it.

Efforts to legalise cannabis were ultimately defeated, with 48.4 per cent of voters in favour and 50.7 per cent against.

“Referendum voting is often more volatile and unpredictable than voting in elections based on party politics,” said researchers Marta Rychert and Chris Wilkins, both of Massey University’s College of Health.

“Adding to this volatility, the governing Labour Party decided the cannabis referendum would be a ‘conscience’ rather than a ‘party’ vote,” they wrote in a research paper.

“The self-imposed neutrality of the centre-left Labour Party and its popular leader may have been a decisive factor in the narrow defeat.”

A spokeswoman for the prime minister declined to comment. Ardern has previously said she wanted New Zealanders to form their own views.
READ MORE: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/124461288/ardern-not-revealing-cannabis-stance-may-have-been-decisive-factor-in-referendum-result?cid=app-iPhone

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Bob McCoskrie
A new article has appeared the The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific this week.

Entitled New Zealand’s failed cannabis legalization referendum – implications for cannabis policy reform, it’s by Benedikt Fischer (a long-standing campaigner for legalisation) and Australian Wayne Hall.

In a short analysis, it concludes:

“Governments and lawmakers, rather, will need to develop and move forward reform initiatives in their respective political systems and demonstrate leadership and courage in persuading their citizens that cannabis legalization is a desirable and valid policy direction.”

An atrocious piece. Ignore the people – only MPs should have a say. The public are too dumb. Helen Clark made these same claims. (Ironically she was the one who ‘whipped’ her own MPs to vote for the prostitution law reform when she was PM.)

By the way, this sentence in the article is just fake news

“New Zealand’s current cannabis control approach is prohibition-based. Law enforcement has the discretion to make ‘no-charge’ where a health-based approach is more beneficial but this is not commonly exercised.” 

From the latest Salvation Army Report released just this week…

Prosecutions for cannabis offences declined by 15 percent between June 2020 (5223 offences) and June 2019 (6125 offences). In fact, prosecutions for cannabis have declined by 70 percent since 2010. In 2019/20, 45 percent of those charged with cannabis-related offences were Māori. However, the number of Māori being charged with cannabis offences has consistently declined, dropping by 57 percent between 2010/11 and 2019/20.

And last November, Radio NZ reported

40% reduction in cannabis prosecutions in the last 5 years. Statistics for the three months to September show prosecutions for Māori are down by 17%, and there’s been a 50% increase in warnings to Māori where there are two or more offences. Fewer than 20% of all people caught with cannabis were prosecuted, and 500 people have been referred to health professionals.

Bob McCoskrie
An excellent commentary in The Conversation – “NZ’s smoking rates dropped dramatically thanks to a hard-hitting campaign. Could we do the same to bring emissions down?”

Good to see that some researchers at Otago University still aspire for best health outcomes. This article’s headings could be changed to: “NZ’s smoking rates dropped dramatically thanks to hard-hitting campaign. Could we do same to bring *cannabis use* down?”

Yes. Here’s how. From the article….

“One of the key lessons from tobacco control is the need to intervene in multiple levels to reshape the entire system. This includes:

• interventions at the policy level (taxation on tobacco products, advertising and sponsorship bans)

• creating environments that support being smoke-free (no smoking in public places such as bars, playgrounds, workplaces; plain packaging)

• community action (community-based tobacco control programmes such as Aukati Kaipaipa)

• helping individual smokers to quit

• reorienting health services to promote tobacco control by requiring health providers to collect and report on smoking status.

• Combined, these interventions have reduced smoking rates from 36% in 1976 to 13% in 2020. We moved from a society where smoking was ubiquitous (remember smoking in planes, bars, restaurants and workplaces?) to one where smoking is no longer seen as a “normal” activity.
• Importantly, tobacco control interventions now enjoy a high level of support, including often from smokers. These wide-ranging environmental interventions created behavioural change and support for further interventions.

Making it easier for people to change

• Evidence from public health shows policy interventions that go hand in hand with supportive environments are likely to make the biggest difference in behaviour changes.”

Don’t tell the Drug Foundation though. It will wreck their funding model.

NewsTalk ZB 18 February 2021
Family First Comment: Go Kate 🙂
“Will we see this reported here in NZ? No of course not, it doesn’t fit the pro-cannabis agenda so prevalent here in mainstream media. Which is a shame, because when facts are presented as data, they deserve to be reported, not ignored.”

PR NewsWire 15 February 2021
Family First Comment: NEW STUDY JUST RELEASED:
“Adolescents who live in California may be more likely to use marijuana since adult recreational marijuana use was legalized in 2016, according to a new report in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs… There were greater increases in marijuana use prevalence after recreational marijuana legalization among youth in ‘low-risk’ groups, which is concerning.. the greater increases in these normally low-risk groups may be attributed to marijuana use becoming more normative due to legalization…”
Who would have thought?!!

Adolescents who live in California may be more likely to use marijuana since adult recreational marijuana use was legalized in 2016, according to a new report in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

“The apparent increase in marijuana use among California adolescents after recreational marijuana legalization for adult use in 2016 is surprising given the steady downward trend in marijuana use during years before legalization,” says lead researcher Mallie J. Paschall, Ph.D., senior research scientist at the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation in Berkeley, Calif.

Paschall and colleagues analyzed data from over three million 7th, 9th, and 11th graders who participated in the California Healthy Kids Survey from 2010-2011 through 2018-2019 school years. The adolescents provided information on their grade, sex, ethnicity, race and lifetime and past-30-day marijuana use.

The researchers observed significant increases in the prevalence of lifetime and past-30-day marijuana use among nearly all demographic groups from 2017-2018 to 2018-2019 school years, after legalization of adult recreational use: an 18% increase in the likelihood of lifetime use and a 23% increase in past-30-day use. These numbers may reflect greater use of vaping products, and the overall increase was even more likely among those in demographic groups with historically lower rates of marijuana use.

“I was somewhat surprised to see relatively greater increases in the prevalence of marijuana use among younger adolescents (7th graders) relative to 9th and 11th graders, among females versus males, among non-Hispanic versus Hispanic youth, and among Whites versus youth in other racial groups,” says Paschall. “In other words, there were greater increases in marijuana use prevalence after recreational marijuana legalization among youth in ‘low-risk’ groups, which is concerning.”

Paschall says he can only speculate as to the reason, but that the greater increases in these normally low-risk groups may be attributed to marijuana use becoming more normative due to legalization, along with relatively greater overall declines in marijuana use among youth in historically ‘high-risk’ groups during the study period.

The study also indicated greater increases in the frequency of past-30-day marijuana use among older adolescents, males, African American and Asian youth who were regular users. There were notable increases in marijuana use frequency among adolescents in 2018-2019, which may reflect national increases in the use of vaping products.

The researchers suggest that recreational marijuana legalization may present increased opportunities for adolescents to obtain marijuana and that the increasing availability of non-smoking products such as edibles may prove appealing as well.

Paschall and his colleagues also write that states and communities that have legalized adult recreational marijuana use and sales could benefit from implementing both stricter controls on the availability of marijuana to adolescents and evidence-based prevention programs.
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/teens-may-be-more-likely-to-use-marijuana-after-legalization-for-adult-recreational-use-301227489.html

The legalisation of marijuana continues to be a social disaster in Colorado.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) have just released their bi-annual “Monitoring Health Concerns Related to Marijuana in Colorado” report. The report finds there have been significant increases in past-month and daily or near-daily use among adults, marijuana-impaired driving, exposures in children under the age of five, and use of high potency forms of the drug among high school students.

Also, despite constant statements to the contrary, after an initial reduction in use, regular youth marijuana use among those under 15 rose 14.8% in 2019 versus 2017.

According to the report, there were significant increases in the use of high potency concentrates among high schoolers in Colorado. Since the last release of this report, marijuana vaping among high schoolers rose 70 percent while the use of marijuana “dabs” has risen 49 percent. Among high school students who reported use of marijuana in the past month, the use of dabs saw a significant 156 percent increase.

According to CDPHE, there has been a dramatic increase in the annual frequency of accidental exposure of children (aged 0-5) to marijuana with a total of 37 reports in 2016 versus 95 in 2019. The number of accidental exposures in 2019 represents the highest such total to date. Marijuana edibles (which are abundantly found in kid-friendly forms) account for the largest proportion of marijuana exposures.

In a similar vein, the report found that since 2017, emergency department discharges with marijuana-related billing codes among children aged 0-9 years saw a significant, 66 percent increase.

Since the release of 2017 data, daily or near-daily use among Colorado adults has increased 20 percent (7.6 percent in 2017 versus 9.1 percent in 2019), and nearly half (48.2 percent) of adult marijuana users in the state consumed the substance on a daily basis. This is concerning as daily use of today’s higher potency marijuana has been shown to increase the risk of developing severe mental illness such as psychosis up to fivefold.

Media Release 1 February 2021
A longitudinal study led by the University of Queensland in collaboration with Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and the University of Melbourne has found that regular cannabis use has harmful effects regardless of the age a person starts using it.

The research – published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review – followed 1792 Australian high school students aged 15 in 1992, and investigated their patterns of cannabis use across twenty years.

It found that by the age of 35, those who had regularly used cannabis in their early 20s were far more likely to engage in high-risk alcohol consumption, not have a job, and be daily smokers. They were also 20x more likely to use illicit substances, and 60% more likely to not be in a stable relationship. There was also a higher risk of depression.

The study authors said: “Two-thirds of people who use cannabis regularly started use in their early 20s. Because adult-onset is a lot more common than adolescent on-set, most of the harms associated with cannabis are in fact in the group who begin later on. Those who began regular use as a young adult accounted for the highest proportion of subsequent illicit drug use and tobacco use in the population, and a much higher proportion of high-risk drinking.”

Dr Gary Chan, the study’s lead author, said the key message of this study is that as well as for teenagers, there is an elevated risk of a range of adverse outcomes for those who started using cannabis regularly in their early 20s, and that the risk was still high, even if the participants had stopped using it as much by their 30s. Dr Chan said many previous studies had documented the harms associated with regular cannabis use in teens, but few have looked at the adverse consequences associated with use from young adulthood. Overall, regular use of cannabis – more than weekly and especially daily use – was found to have harmful consequences, regardless of the age people began using it.

“While many studies, including the Christchurch Health and Development Study and the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health & Development Study, and also the US Surgeon-General have all pointed to the risks of cannabis use for adolescents, this Australian study finds adverse outcomes also for those who started using cannabis regularly in their early 20s. There is a basic public health message which the New Zealand government should be strongly pushing – regular cannabis use is harmful, regardless of when an individual initiates its use,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

According to the latest Ministry of Health data, use of cannabis in New Zealand in the past 12 months is most prevalent amongst the 15-34 year old age group. In 2019, only 23% of high school students reported having ever using marijuana in their lifetime, dropping from 38% in 2001.
ENDS

Cosmos 27 January 2021
More bad news for pot tokers: a study led by the University of Queensland (UQ) has found that regular cannabis use has harmful effects regardless of the age a person starts using it.

CNN Health 20 January 2021
Family First Comment: “Studies in adults show a strong association between overuse of weed and suicide attempts and death. A study of adult same-sex twins found those who were dependent on marijuana were nearly 3x more likely to attempt suicide than their twin who was not dependent on weed.”
This study shows that young people are at high risk also.
Thank goodness NZ voted No 👍😄