What Should The Minimum Age For Drugs Be? (Your Radical Questions with Neil Woods)

SPEAKER_1 (0:08)

Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast, and ask them about their ideas for the future. Neil Woods is still here with me. He's a former police officer and undercover drugs operative, who has now become a campaigner for the legalisation of illegal drugs. Neil joined me for the main episode. It was a fascinating exploration of the many complex issues in this topic. Neil talked about his experience in the police and the events that led to his radical change of mind, as well as his passionate belief that we should legalise both the possession and supply of drugs, and task government with the job of regulating them. If you haven't listened yet, I definitely recommend going back and checking out that episode first. But there's even more to get into in this issue, and I'm glad to say Neil is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in.

Our first question comes from Carol Curtis, who sent in this email.

Carol says, I have concern for young people as their brain is still developing towards adulthood. Should the legalising of drugs include an age related exemption to protect young people at a crucial time in their brain development, along with the offer of a short course in their school curriculum on why and why not we take drugs?

Neil Woods (1:33)

Yes, a great question. And I absolutely agree. The problem is, with prohibition, is that we have children with easier access to drugs, and they are young developing brains, and they shouldn't be taking drugs.

So we know from the evidence of alcohol regulation in North America, that regulation protects young people better than prohibition does. But it becomes a very important question as to what age do you regulate? Because 18 is the traditional age for alcohol. But there is some good evidence that actually for cannabis, it should be older. And there's some suggestion that it should actually be as old as 21 But certainly, following the evidence, I think it should be older than 18

And the education, well, yes, absolutely. It is much easier to educate about the harms of drugs and how to reduce those harms once you have a regulated supply of those drugs for the adult market. Because how do you educate accurately when you don't know what's in the drugs? You know, you need to have control of that of that commodity.

SPEAKER_1 (2:50)

It's interesting, because if you're talking about cannabis, and it's certainly true, the risk of psychosis, I think it's greatest up till the age of 25 And if you're looking at the risk of cannabis-induced psychosis, that would fall into that bracket. But then we also know that cannabis is the most widely used drug among teenagers. So could you be confident that if you were following a public health perspective and having an age limit in your 20s for cannabis, that that's going to change anything at all in terms of young people, teenagers, using cannabis?

Neil Woods (3:21)

Well, it's a judgment call.

It will have to be designed very, very carefully and mitigate the risk for the age versus the risk of not being able to adequately capture the market. Because if you look at what happened in Canada, I mean, you can see what mistakes they made in Canada. They made two very significant mistakes. One was in pricing. They priced it too much. They got hungry for the tax benefits too quickly. So they didn't capture enough of the illicit market quickly enough. And another thing is they didn't use the knowledge of the people within the illicit cannabis industry for quality, because there's a connoisseur aspect to cannabis consumers. They know quality and they didn't adequately produce that quality from the government regulated production.

We need to capture as much of the illicit market as we can, as quickly as we can, to take the power away from organised crime, but also so that we get some semblance of control over the age of people using it. Because if you only capture 50% of the market initially, then you've got 50% of the market, which is illicit and still thriving and still supplying to teenagers. So all of those regulatory mechanisms will have to be considered. But first and foremost, they need to be considered for the health and safety of our young people. That needs to be the primary goal.

SPEAKER_1 (4:48)

What about the second part of Carol's question there about education in schools? I mean, would you be advocating for a slightly different approach to what we currently have?