Chris Selley: Finally, we’ll get some evidence about cannabis legalization. Let’s use it

A year late, which isn’t half bad by federal government standards, former deputy justice minister Morris Rosenberg is set to oversee an expert committee examining whether the Cannabis Act has done what it was supposed to do. Especially in a country where we’re constantly being preached to about “evidence-based policy,” this is an all-too rare process: Actually going back and looking, soberly and comprehensively, at whether the stated and intended goals of legislation were accomplished, and what unintended side-effects were triggered along the way. Here’s hoping the idea catches on.

But it’s an opportunity, too, for the muddled thinking that kept cannabis illegal for decades to make a comeback. Perhaps the best example is the question of children accidentally getting alarmingly high — particularly having consumed edibles, which are often in the form of candy — which has garnered many headlines in recent months. And there doesn’t seem to be any way around it: Pediatric hospital visits for cannabis have soared.

A research letter to JAMA Network Open, published in January, reported an average of 22.6 cannabis-exposure hospital visits per month among Ontarian children under 10 from February 2020 to March 2021 — way up from 2.5 per month in the months leading up to legalization. One-third of those visits resulted in a hospital admission, the research letter reported, and 3.6 per cent of kids wound up in the ICU.

A correspondence published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine reported hospital admissions for cannabis among under-10s had increased in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec combined, from 2.6 per month pre-legalization to 16.7 between January 2020 and September 2021.

Crucially, both publications showed the problem really taking off once edibles were legalized federally and became available in provinces that chose to allow their sale. And since Quebec opted out of the edible revolution, it essentially volunteered as a control province.

1. Liberals finally begin year-late pot-legalization review

2. Cannabis retailers sued for selling drug-infused Skittles

The results are stark. In the 20 months following Ontario’s, Alberta’s and B.C.’s decisions to legalize retail of edibles, the pediatric hospitalization rate for cannabis exposure shot up in those provinces combined from 2.5 per 100,000 kids per year to 7.2.

In Quebec, it rose from 2.4 to just 2.8.

No doubt these findings will reassure Quebec it made the right choice. No doubt Rosenberg’s panel will hear some voices demanding provinces row back on edibles, or at least consider no further liberalization — relaxing the limit of 10 milligrams of THC per edible, for example.

As always, some perspective is in order.

For starters: Overall pediatric poisonings don’t seem to have increased since legalization; they’re actually down, at least in Ontario, according to the JAMA Network research letter. A higher percentage of childhood poisoning incidents now involve cannabis. But they’re not additional poisonings.

Clearly — if only for their own sakes! — parents need to keep their stashes out of their children’s reach, just as should all other household poisons. But kids only have so many hours in the day and days in the week to try to send themselves to hospital. Weed doesn’t sound so awful when you consider the other major sources of accidental pediatric poisonings: prescription drugs of all kinds, plus “household cleaners, alcohol, plants, fertilizers, pesticides, paint thinner, antifreeze and beauty products,” injury-prevention charity Parachute Canada reports.

That also somewhat puts the lie to the idea that edibles are uniquely dangerous because they look and taste like candy. “I don’t think that you ever want to look at a problem like this and say the only response here is for more parental education and responsibility,” Dr. Daniel Myran, lead author of the NEJM correspondence, told Global News earlier this month. I don’t know about that. That seems to be exactly where the problem lies.

We must hope Rosenberg’s expert panel is capable of navigating these issues better than many experts were in the days before legalization. And as I say, ideally this kind of endeavour would catch on.

Poisonings aside, the edibles issue illustrates one of the beauties of federalism: By leaving so much cannabis policy up to provinces — edibles or no edibles, public versus private retail, etc. — the federal government essentially created a policy laboratory, whose findings can inform best practices across the country and abroad.

Who took the biggest bite out of the black market? Who created the best retail environments? Who legalized edibles, but kept harms to children at a minimum? Which province made, or ideally saved, the most money? At a time of even more crisis than usual in the health-care system, in particular, these are exactly the sorts of inquiries the federal government should be leading.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

Get the latest from Chris Selley straight to your inbox