Criminal gangs are using proceeds from black market cannabis to fund the trafficking of much harder drugs, with Australia’s ongoing prohibition succeeding only in heaping “harm upon harm” on society, a new paper from the Penington Institute has revealed.
In a withering assessment of Australia’s current approach to cannabis, far from eradicating its use and limiting availability, criminalising cannabis is simply playing into the hands of the illegal drug trade, and punishing small-time users and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
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After years of prohibition, the use of illegal cannabis purchased from criminal sources continues to flourish unabated. Meanwhile, regulators spend significant amounts of money on overseeing the legal medical cannabis industry, and police spend even more on arresting recreational users. Ironically, legally imported cannabis may be ending up in the criminal market due to a lack of coordination between federal and state reporting and many medical cannabis patients are actually self-medicating recreational users. The more I learn about the industry, the more I realise that the money wasted on regulation and policing would be much better spent on education, quality monitoring, and harm minimisation.