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In the public policy realm, evoking the need to ‘protect our innocent children’ is meant to respond to persistent ‘moral panics’ over young people’s substance use, and in this way it is not much different a narrative than that offered up by our previous government in their anti-drug strategy scare tactics. Anyone who is a parent, or who works with youth, knows that telling them to abstain and ‘Just Say No’, only works for some kids, some of the time. Moreover, this approach does a disservice to those who are inclined to experiment or who may be more vulnerable to the negative health consequences associated with early initiation of cannabis, closing off meaningful dialogue about the potential risks and how these may be mitigated or avoided altogether. This is important because in the absence of opportunities to have open and honest conversations about drugs with the ‘real’ people in their lives, youth will turn to unreliable sources of online information. In our current context where cannabis is an illicit substance, parents, educators and other adults working with children are frequently faced with this challenge — there is a high prevalence of youth and adult use in Canada, but the illegal status of cannabis means there are very few openings to have age-appropriate and evidence-informed discussions to empower youth in their decision-making.

So, instead of panicking about a potential rise in youth use rates, let’s use this policy window as an opportunity to have new conversations with the youth we care about and are responsible for. Instead of giving airtime to the morally outraged, let’s listen to the folks who work in youth prevention and who know the types of strategies that are successful in connecting with those who are resistant or ‘hard to reach’. What the best prevention science tells us is that spending millions on media awareness campaigns and school-based programming have produced few proven long-term effects. In fact, some of the most widely used drug prevention programming has shown no evidence of decreasing use, and has actually been associated with the increased use of some substances.