Tanis Cortens:
The array of health problems caused by cannabis has serious consequences. A May 2023 analysis by Quest Diagnostics found that, in the general U.S. workforce, the percentage of employees testing positive for marijuana after an on-the-job accident reached a 25-year high in 2022, marking a steady overall 204.2 per cent increase from 2012. Katie Mueller of the National Safety Council said, “Intoxicating cannabis products, including marijuana, can have a major impact on safety at work and have been proven to slow reaction time, impact memory and impair skills essential to driving. State legalization of the drug creates new challenges for employers.”
Along similar lines, a June 2022 report on 2020 Canadian cannabis crime statistics from the Department of Justice showed a 105 per cent increase in the rate of drug-impaired driving offences from 2017 to 2020, around the early stages of cannabis legalization and commercialization (though the increase may be partly due to new legislation providing police with greater means to spot drug-impaired drivers). At the provincial/territorial level, every jurisdiction but the Northwest Territories and Nunavut saw an increase.
Legal marijuana poses another danger in its attraction to the homeless, exemplified by a June 2018 survey of inmates in seven Colorado jails. Of respondents who had been homeless in the past 30 days and who had moved to the state after it legalized recreational marijuana in 2012, 35.1 per cent gave “medical and/or recreational marijuana” as a reason for their move, making it the third most common reason given by that group. A July 3, 2018 CNN article said Larimer County Sheriff Justin Smith was unsurprised by the results. “It was not unusual” for some out-of-state inmates in the county jail “to bring up marijuana as one of the factors that influenced their decision to come here,” he told CNN.
On June 29, 2016, a man was caught on video swinging a large pipe at pedestrians at an intersection in Denver. Then-mayor Michael Hancock blamed the incident on marijuana legalization and “urban travelers” — people with nowhere to go who had not been in the city for long. “This is one of the results of the legalization of marijuana in Denver, and we’re going to have to deal with it,” he said.
Oregon, which legalized in 2014, still has a thriving black market for cannabis, largely in the form of illicit cultivation in the south of the state. According to a January 14, 2022 article in Politico Magazine, economist Beau Whitney explained that because unlicensed growers are not paying taxes or fees, they can afford to sell their products below legal market price. Furthermore, most cannabis grown in southern Oregon is transported to places in the U.S. where cannabis is either illegal to buy or legal but quite expensive. Natalie Fertig described the consequences of the black market: “Personal wells have run dry and rivers have been illegally diverted. Piles of trash litter abandoned grow sites. Locals report having knives pulled on them, and growers showing up on their porches with guns to make demands about local water use. Multiple women say they’ve been followed long distances by strange vehicles. Locals regularly end conversations with an ominous warning: ‘Be careful.’”
Turning back to Canada, the findings of a September 2024 study in Journal of Community Safety and Well-Being, entitled “The impacts of cannabis legalization on organized crime in Ontario and British Columbia,” consist of three main points. First, Health Canada-administered licences allowing patients to produce their own medical cannabis have been obtained and abused by organized crime groups (OCGs), which grow more than their licences permit and move the cannabis to the black market. An Ontario law enforcement officer was quoted in the study, “Law enforcement is not authorized to inspect medical grow operations. Licensees are often notified of Health Canada inspections in advance, prompting OCGs to reduce their plant quantities and hide industrial growing equipment.” Second, public safety has deteriorated in some Indigenous communities as violence has increased along with the number of illegal stores. Third, legalization has led law enforcement resources to be directed toward other drugs such as fentanyl, reducing the ability to combat illicit cannabis.
Advocates of legal marijuana say it is “victimless crime.” These studies suggest otherwise.
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