I would like to address this.

With teenage use, the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2017 reported that teens do not experience an increase in psychotic symptoms with cannabis alone. It happens that when they use tobacco or alcohol along with cannabis, that can aggravate the symptoms. It's a very small percentage of people, already predisposed, who might be aggravated.

The British Association of Psychopharmacology in 2016 said there's no IQ loss in teenagers, that even long-term chronic users of marijuana do not suffer any decrease in IQ. We can see over history the increase in use of marijuana, but schizophrenia rates do not go up, IQ rates do not go down, and as I said, the American Psychological Association in 2015 said that even chronic teenage users don't have any further health problems later on in life.

I'd like to touch on growing in the home, since this touches municipalities. The reason people are growing in houses is that it's valuable. It's risk and reward. The more you prohibit or over-regulate something, the more people are going to try to get around that, or it will increase the value.

With growing in houses, however, in February of last year, Federal Court Justice Michael Phelan analyzed growing inside the home and found that, despite the testimony of Len Garis and other law enforcement officials, cannabis growing in the home can be done safely and in most cases is done safely. That's why he offered a federal injunction to provide permission to patients to grow cannabis in their home.

When I came into this building, I noted that there's a giant green wall with plants on it. That's a hydroponic system. It's an indoor growing operation right here in this very building, but it's done safely. The vast majority of consumers, growers, and even sellers of cannabis do not want mouldy bud. They do not want bad conditions in the home. The worst cases you find with grow ops that do damage and destruction are not among patients and advocates, but profiteers.

The only reason those profiteers are even involved in the growing and selling of cannabis is that when government over-regulates it and criminalizes it, it increases the penalties and it increases the reward. Just make it extremely cheap and extremely available. Organized crime is not going out there selling you sugar, because it's available everywhere, and if we had cannabis just as available, you would take away the profit motive from organized crime and they'd have to find some other job to do.

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