Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 3 October 2024
Committee on Drugs Use
A Health-Led Approach: Discussion (Resumed)
9:30 am
Dr. Barry Cullen:
Young people's use of cannabis has been quite stable over the past ten years. The latest research done on people's use of cannabis illustrated that young people are not using cannabis as much as they were five years previously. We need to keep that in focus. We need to be careful about some of the information that sometimes comes from clinical samples. The medical people have clinical samples and are not necessarily working off population samples.
Over the past 15 years or so young people have managed to differentiate between the dangers relating to heroin and the dangers with cannabis. They have opted to use cannabis instead of heroin, which was devastating when young people were using it. They have the capacity to make the differentiation between cannabis that is highly dangerous and cannabis that is not so dangerous. Having said that, a legal framework around the supply of cannabis would certainly make those choices much easier.
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