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Pamela McColl is a drug researcher and author of Pied Pipers of Pot: Protecting Youth from the Marijuana Industry. Pamela resides in Vancouver, Canada.

Pamela presented online to the Drug Advisory Council of Australia’s (DACA) Youth Forum, Breathtaker Series, held on Sunday, October 12, 2025, in Melbourne, with our other visiting guest speaker, Dr Phillip Drum, an oncological pharmacologist from San Francisco.

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I’m really happy to share what I know about marijuana because it took me 15 years to educate myself and to connect with people around the world who work on this policy. And it’s always a delight to share my knowledge and my concerns about marijuana policy with audiences such as yours and particularly youth.

Now, some of you are here possibly because you’re interested in the conversation about marijuana legalisation. As a Canadian, I know all about that. I was part of the campaign to oppose it in Canada from 2014 to 2018. Or, you might be here because you’re considering using marijuana. And I can share some concerns I have on that, specifically based on good science.

You may be here because somebody in your world is using marijuana, and you may be concerned about them and don’t know how to approach them. I hope this conversation helps you.

I came to marijuana through a tobacco-prevention background. I worked on the “denormalisation” campaigns that took on the tobacco industry, an industry that was lying, deceiving and coercing people, particularly youth, into buying its products and becoming addicted.

Normalisation

It was fascinating to see the marijuana industry turn around when they realised that they were getting pushback about the idea of legalisation in the 1970s and 1980s, and they came out with a campaign of “normalisation”. They wanted to normalise marijuana across society before we could de-normalise it any further.

They were so far ahead of us and they were so well funded and well positioned that they succeeded in rolling out marijuana for medical purposes, by having people vote on a medicine. They have also had some success in the legalisation of marijuana for non-medical purposes.

How do you arm youth against an industry that is going after them with another addictive product and with great amounts of money? How do you put a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old up against the likes of that? It’s on us to find ways to legislate and to control these industries so they don’t prey on our youth.

We did that with tobacco. We got through legislation to control tobacco. With the support of the public, we got it out of restaurants, off airplanes and out of other places where non-users, particularly children, were exposed to damage.

When I was at the United Nations in New York, I attended a meeting on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most ratified piece of human rights legislation ever to be passed. It has been signed by every single country in the world, except for the United States and Samoa.

Article 33 of that treaty specifically says that children need to be protected from the use of psychotropic drugs in the home. Marijuana is one of those products. The reasons for this are the modelling of drug use, the second-hand smoke exposure, and the experience of intoxication.

I note in passing that alcohol and tobacco and marijuana are different drugs, they have different effects, but marijuana is used only for intoxication. You can have a drink and not become drunk. You can have a drink and not inflict someone with second-hand smoke. You can have a cigarette and not create an accident for somebody.

Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau allowed marijuana in the homes of children. He allowed the plants to be grown in homes, parents to legally use in homes. That is a violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Australia is part of that Convention, so possibly that is a way to stop legalisation. The Convention is not enforceable by law – it is an international treaty – but it certainly speaks to the fact that the world, by and large, supports that policy.

Testimony Too Hot to Handle

I also testified at Canada’s House of Commons. I was called before the Minister of Health, the Minister of Public Safety, Lawyers for Health Canada, and others. I put forward six hours of testimony. After I spoke, I was greeted by the chair of the Task Force for Canada, a former Health Minister, who, because my testimony, I believe, was so damaging and my science so thorough and complete, told me that she was sealing the meeting notes and no one would ever see or hear what I said. Pretty incredible in a democratic country to have something like that happen!

I also put forward a list of experts to speak at the House of Commons to the Conservative Party of Canada. They chose Dr Stuart Reece, an Australian medical doctor and scientist. Dr Reece was going to speak on chromosomal damage, sperm morphology, the damage to male reproductive health by marijuana.

To my great horror, when they realised Dr Reese’s topic, the committee of liberals who were choosing people to speak uninvited this reputable, world-class researcher to speak. They never heard him, and they were never going to hear me. So, I just want to read to you what the House of Commons really was trying to hide in 2014.

I found a document four years ago when I was starting this campaign to oppose the legalisation of marijuana. It’s from the government of Canada, Health Canada, and it reads:

“Cannabis should not be used if you:

• Are under the age of 25.
• Are allergic to any cannabinoid or to smoke.
• Have serious liver, kidney, heart or lung disease.
• Have a personal or family history of serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia, psychosis, depression, or bipolar disorder.
• Are pregnant, are planning to get pregnant, or are breast-feeding.
• Are a man who wishes to start a family.
• Have a history of alcohol or drug abuse or substance dependence.”

The one that jumps out at me is, “Are a man who wishes to start a family”. The government of Canada recognised the science on testicular cancer from marijuana, on sperm morphology, on DNA damage, chromosomal shattering, that has a hundred-year generational consequence. Meaning that, if a young man uses, he may influence negatively the health of his children and his grandchildren.

Why did the government of Canada legalise a drug knowing this? And that is exactly what they did. This is their document and they didn’t want me telling everybody about it. Why don’t they want you to know? How can you go about finding the answers?

A mountain of scientific research has been conducted over the last five, six decades on marijuana. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars on marijuana research. The science is overwhelmingly negative on a whole range of issues from reproductive health, pregnancy, to heart, lung, liver, all kinds of things. Then you get to the issues of mental health, the early onset of schizophrenia in some individuals. So, the health aspects of marijuana require a very serious conversation.

Pushing and Rushing

The public, especially youth, are uneducated on this issue. I don’t think it’s fair to legalise a product that the public is so misinformed about, particularly when they are exposed to a predatory industry that wants you to believe that there are nothing but benefits.

It’s important to understand what’s really going on. When the marijuana industry came along in the 1970s and ’80s, it started to infiltrate public health, education systems, universities and politics. It has immense power. A lot of money is at stake here. And the industry went after it in a big way. It went after it through marijuana for medical purposes and played on people’s compassion, got cannabidiol (CBD) and tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) rushed through as pain-relief drugs.

Marijuana was never the primary drug of choice for the ailments it was originally sanctioned for. It is really important that you understand this. As with tobacco, it’s the industry pushing it. For instance, one of these pot pushers in the industry said in a film that I worked on for ABC Australia called Cannabis Inc: “People have been consuming cannabis around the world for the last 5,000 years, and there’s no known reports of cannabis causing an illness or causing death.”

Now, I want to just read out a couple of things that I have here. I received this memo just last week. “In the United States, both breast carcinoma in 20 to 34-year-old females and testes cancer in 15 to 39-year-old males had annual incidence rate increases. They were highly correlated with the increase in the number of cannabis legalisation jurisdictions. The data from Canada showed an even greater increase in both breast and testicular cancer incidents, higher than in the United States.”

As far as the rate of use, in the records that I have for Australia from 2023, 11.5 per cent of people had used marijuana in the past 12 months. That’s roughly 2.5 million people. So, just keep that number in mind – 11.5 per cent. Well, Canada has 26 per cent. Back in 2017, Canada was at 14.8 per cent. So, all I can say is, where are you headed? Because if you think things are bad now, you’ll have a doubling, because the industry will ensure that you do.

Another area the marijuana industry really capitalised on was the idea that the user has more rights than the non-user. This libertarian concept that because you are an adult, you’re legally allowed to use it, you should be able to do whatever you want, no matter what the rest of us believe.

But the non-user, just as with tobacco, has become a victim of marijuana. Not only do we pay for all these hospitalisations and ambulances, but they are also on the roads, causing all kinds of crashes that can injure or kill us too. So, marijuana use is not harmless, and it’s not without its victims.

The way they get you is that they sell you a belief system, and they do it in a very manipulative way. They tell you there’ll be benefits from marijuana. Because people don’t do things if there are no benefits, right? Why would you do something if there was nothing good about it? So, they sell you on the benefits, but they don’t tell you about the risks.

Think about jaywalking or darting about playing chicken in heavy traffic. It’s a really dangerous thing to do. Ever since you were a little child, you have learned to look to the left, look to the right, make sure no one’s going to run you over, right? Playing in traffic is kind of insane. We have educated ourselves that crossing the road and jaywalking come with risk. We are educated. We don’t jaywalk unless we know there are no cars coming.

There are also legal penalties if you jaywalk. We have sanctions to deter people from doing this because it is dangerous. The point is that they say to you, you’re going to use because you’re young and you’re going to take risks and you think you’re invincible and, you know, everyone does drugs.

No, they don’t. Not if they are educated properly. You mitigate danger because you actually care about your future. You care about your brain. You care about your health. You care about the fact that you may want to have children.

You’re educated on jaywalking. You need to be educated on marijuana, so you know the risks. And you can’t let them take advantage of this stereotype that youth will just take risks regardless. It’s really important to take time to ask yourselves, what are the risks? What are the benefits? I’m deciding for myself, I have agency. I’m not going to let some industry sell me down the river so they can make money from me, and I could become an addicted person for the rest of my life.

Manipulation, Verbal and Moral

I want to just say two things in closing.

ONE: There is no such thing as medical marijuana. It doesn’t exist.

There is a thing called marijuana for medical purposes, and it’s often self-directed, but there’s no such thing as medical marijuana. Marijuana will never be a medicine. It’s impossible. It has hundreds of compounds. When smoked, it has all kinds of cannabinoids. It can’t possibly be a medicine that is dosed with a side-effect profile. It’s not possible. It’s a con. It’s probably the biggest hoax of the 21st century.

So, the pro-marijuana industry got us with compassion, and it has gone on from there.

TWO: As with tobacco, one of the lies that they tell you with these addictive substances is that you do it to de-stress, you do it to relax. Well, drug addiction creates a withdrawal symptom. The withdrawal symptom is anxiety. It means the drug has left your system, you need more, you get a bit anxious. When you get your drug, alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, whatever, you get a relief from getting your drug back into your body. They call it stress relief. I call it drug addiction.

It’s so important to understand some of these principles and ideas. And I really hope that, when you come to the idea of legalisation, that you ask, do you really want more marijuana in your society? Knowing that the public does not understand the risks properly, be it driving, be it pregnancy, be it male reproductive health, be it liver function, be it heart, be it addiction, be it mental health, all of these issues.

Therefore, it would be irresponsible for any government to legalise marijuana without massive public education.

But even then, how do you legalise a drug that men shouldn’t use if they wish to have children? How do you do that? Why would you do that?

And if there’s somebody in your life who you’re really concerned about who uses marijuana, again, the science is available, it’s on the internet, at PubMed. The science is overwhelming. Many people may not believe it, but there is very reputable research and great resources.

There are ways out of drug addiction, be it marijuana or any other drug. As a prohibitionist, I’m also a preventionist, and I’m an optimist, and I really believe in people’s ability to get free of drugs.

I’m not a harm reductionist. That’s a failed ideology that gives up on the user and gives them safe supply because they can’t get off. I don’t believe that. If you look at all kinds of examples in history, people have gotten off drugs.

So, I hope I have given you some things to think about, and hopefully you’ll have a marijuana-free life, and you won’t support legalisation in your society. That would be my wish for you.

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Republished with thanks to News Weekly. Image courtesy of Adobe.