This seminar provides a brief history of how medical and recreational cannabis use have been legalised in the USA and describes how recreational cannabis use is being regulated in eight states in the USA, Uruguay and Canada.
Professor Wayne Hall will explain why it is too early to evaluate the full impacts of cannabis legalisation in the USA, describe the increasing potency of cannabis products, innovations in how cannabis is marketed, and in how cannabis businesses are financed, all of which raise concerns about future public health impacts of cannabis legalisation. Professor Hall will speculate on how these developments may affect patterns of cannabis use after legalisation and use policy experiences with alcohol and tobacco to make some cautious predictions about the likely future effects of legalisation on public health.
Speaker Bio:
Wayne Hall is a Professorial Fellow at the Centre for Youth Substance Abuse Research at the University of Queensland and a Professor at the National Addiction Centre, Kings College London. He has been: Director of CYSAR (2014-2016), NHMRC Australia Fellow at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (2009-2014), Professor of Public Health Policy, School of Population Health (2005-2009), Director of the Office of Public Policy and Ethics, Institute for Molecular Bioscience (2001-2005) and Executive Director of the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (1994-2001). He has advised the World Health Organization on: the health effects of cannabis use; the effectiveness of drug substitution treatment; the contribution of illicit drug use to the global burden of disease; and the ethical implications of genetic and neuroscience research on addiction.