Reefer madness? Try reefer mildness
Despite concerns pot use would soar on legalization, poll finds minor increase
Open cannabis laws did not spark a feared bout of reefer madness in Canada.
Indeed, consumption spikes since July 2018 (after passage of the Cannabis Act) were more like marijuana molehills, according to a large new survey of pot usage and attitudes across the country.
Despite concerns that cannabis use might skyrocket, the survey of 2,002 adults found that just 3 per cent of Canadians tried cannabis for the first time since legalization, with just 18 per cent of the population having used it in the past year. Legalization came into force Oct. 17.
“We’ve got a minor increase in usage (and) we don’t have a strong expressed intent amongst those who haven’t used, to use,” Craig Worden, president of the Toronto polling and research firm Pollara Strategic Insights, said of the survey results.
“So there aren’t a lot of people sitting around who are saying ‘Yeah, that’s going to happen for me and I can’t wait,’ ” he said.
And of the new users the law attracted, most say they will likely be occasional rather than frequent pot participants, Worden added.
It’s the company’s fourth comprehensive cannabis survey of Canadians covering the lead-up to and aftermath of legalization.
“And we actually did see in our polling prior to legalization that there (were) fairly high expectations amongst the general public that usage would spike,” Worden said. “You can (also) see in the tracking that quite large proportions of the population were expecting large negative impacts upon Canada overall.”
Yet, respondents to the latest survey mostly said they’d noticed few signs of worsening road impairment, hard drug usage or other societal ills come to pass, Worden said.
“People have seen that the sky has not fallen and that these concerns have definitely dropped significantly (compared to) how they looked prior to legalization,” he said. “It’s quite a difference (what) actually making it legal has had on people’s attitudes.”
Approval of legalization itself grew by eight points — to 43 per cent — while disapproval was down eight points to 34 per cent. General acceptance was at 64 per cent in the poll, which was given exclusively to the Star.
“And on that score what really stands out to me is how approval has shifted in Quebec which was always the locus of disapproval on this policy,” Worden says.
“We were always tracking Quebecers at about 22 to 25 per cent approval in the years prior to legalization, and after legalization we have 37 per cent, quite an increase.”
In Ontario, approval sits at 43 per cent, with disapproval lagging 10 points back.
The percentage of Canadians saying they expected to see sharp increases in cannabis usage plummeted 21 points — from 69 to 48 per cent — between July and March, Worden says. Along with rampant usage spikes, the biggest legalization fear among Canadians was that impaired driving would worsen, he says.
But these driving fears have abated by some 26 points since legalization, with only 43 per cent of respondents saying they perceive impairment increases now.
Cannabis industry expert Rod Elliot says the poll indicates that the country has taken legalization in stride.
“Concerns over negative impacts legalization was going to have on the lives of Canadians have not materialized,” says Elliot, senior vice-president with the Toronto consulting firm Global Public Affairs.
“There’s still lots of work to be done including getting more Canadians purchasing legal cannabis through legal channels. But overall legalization of cannabis has been by and large successful,” he says.
Among other findings, the poll indicates that dry bud is by far the most popular format for cannabis purchase and consumption, but that demand for edibles, which won’t be on legal offer until October, is still growing.
It also suggests that just 19 per cent of Canadians intend to use cannabis in the next year, up one percentage point over the past 12 months
AStatistics Canada report this month pegged the proportion of Canadians who have used cannabis since Oct. 17 at 18 per cent.
That survey said some 6 per cent of people in the country over the age of 15 — about 1.8 million people — used pot every day since legalization.
Meanwhile, more than half of recent purchasers — six in 10 — say they’ve bought exclusively from the legal market despite an average outlay of $1.58 more per gram at the sanctioned shops and online sites over illegal sources, the Pollara poll says.
(It found an average price of about $11.24 per gram on the legal market and $9.66 through its underground counterpart.)
And with just one in 10 polled users saying they purchased from the black market only, Worden said that one of the legislation’s key stated goals — eradicating the dangerous underground exchange — appears to be working.
The poll was conducted between March 7 and 19. Pollara said the margin of error for a poll this size would be plus or minus 2.2 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.