[420 Girl]

SYDNEY - Miranda Devine asserts ( "A smoking gun in the drugs debate", May 8) that liberalisation of cannabis policy is guaranteed to increase consumption. Evidence should trump intuition. The two major reviews of the experience of countries before and after liberalisation concluded that cannabis consumption remained unchanged or decreased.

In the only comparison of two cities in different countries with different approaches to cannabis, 39 per cent of San Francisco residents had smoked cannabis more than 25 times, compared with 12 per cent of Amsterdam residents.

San Francisco has a more punitive approach to cannabis than Amsterdam. Also, 51 per cent of cannabis users in San Francisco said they had been offered more dangerous drugs (such as heroin or cocaine) the last time they bought the drug, compared with 15 per cent of Amsterdam residents. This suggests that one of the benefits of taxing and regulating cannabis would be to separate the market from more dangerous drugs.

Whether we like it or not, there is strong demand for cannabis in Australia. In 1997 Access Economics estimated that the financial turnover of the country's cannabis industry was $5 billion. Professor Kenneth Clements of the University of Western Australia's Economic Research Centre (The Economics Of Marijuana Consumption report, 1999) estimated that the cannabis industry was then financially the size of Australia's wine industry and amounted to 1 per cent of gross domestic product, the equivalent of $351 for every Australian.

The law of supply and demand suggests that while demand for cannabis remains strong, a supply will inevitably emerge. If no legal source is available, then other sources will emerge.

Why does Devine believe that criminals aided by some corrupt officials are the best people to control a drug she believes is so dangerous? Is there something about criminals that I have been missing?

Five hundred conservative US economists (including the Nobel Prize winner Professor Milton Friedman, who is a long-time advocate of drug reform) signed a petition a few years ago calling for the taxation and regulation of cannabis.

Dr Alex Wodak President, Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation, Darlinghurst

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