VANCOUVER—Less than a month into being the second country to legalize recreational cannabis, a vast majority of Canadians — roughly three quarters — believe the minimum age to purchase marijuana should be raised, according to a new poll.

That’s despite one-quarter of Canadians looking into purchasing pot and one-eighth using cannabis since legalization, Angus Reid Institute researchers found.

“A month after legal is an opportunity for people to have reflected on some of the big policy pieces around this and had a chance to test out the market for themselves,” said Shachi Kurl, the Institute’s executive director.

Questions remain over the long-term impacts of marijuana on young people, she added.

But while most Canadians offered up a “collective shrug” now that marijuana is legal — with a majority answering they were neither pleased nor disappointed when asked during the second week following legalization — there are split opinions on what the appropriate minimum age should be.

One-in-four believed 21 to be more appropriate, but the report found roughly the same number would like to see that age raised even higher.

The federal government set the minimum age at 18, which Alberta and Quebec adopted — which the report also found one-in-four Canadians supported. Provinces are welcome to raise that age, but none have yet set the legal age higher than 19, according to the government website.

“This debate will linger for awhile, given that the science on the impacts of consuming cannabis under 25 is a little bit outstanding,” Kurl said. “We haven’t seen consensus on that matter. And the feds left it to the provinces to come up with their own minimum ages which leaves some room for debate.”

Albertans and Atlantic Canadians were the only two regions who agreed with the province’s minimum age. But in every other region, there was major division, Kurl said. For instance, in B.C. there was a 44 per cent split between lowering the age and increasing it to 21 years old.

Still, the public divide hinges on the hypothetical minimum age of 21, the report noted. Half of respondents said the minimum age should be 20 or under, while the other half said 21 or over.

And men and women lean in opposite directions, driven largely by age, Kurl said.

“Younger women of all age groups are less likely than men across all age groups that the age should be 18,” Kurl explained. “This is an issue that drove and captured the attention of men, in particular, between the ages of 18-34.”

Millennial respondents were twice as likely to say they were pleased to see cannabis available, while that number was inverted for those over the age of 55, who were 43 per cent disappointed.

The issue was also associated with political affiliation.

“If you are older and voted for Conservatives, you’re more likely to say that it should be a higher age,” Kurl explained.

In fact, one-quarter from this group preferred the age to be 25 or older, the report found.

The Angus Reid Institute conducted an online survey of 1,500 adults from October 24-29. The margin of error was 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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