Cannabis criminal offences are on the decline according to the Statistics Canada’s latest police reported crime statistics released on July 23. However, another report recently released by Statistics Canada tell a different story about cannabis use in Canada.
Canadian police services reported 90,000 drug related offenses in 2017 with over half of these offenses being related to cannabis in 48,000 cases.
This is down 15 per cent from 2016 rates with 8,000 less cases than reported in 2016.
Only five per cent of impaired driving offenses in Canada in 2017 were related to drug use, which is a 10 per cent increase since 2016. However, Statistics Canada does not break that number down any further to the kinds of drugs involved.
Statistics Canada released the National Cannabis Survey for the second quarter of 2018 on Aug. 9 which included 7,285 respondents self-reporting on their cannabis use.
With the responses available, Statistics Canada reports that “14% of cannabis users with a valid driver’s license reported driving within two hours of using cannabis. Males were nearly two times more likely than females to report this behaviour.”
From 2009-2017, the number of police-reported drug-related-driving incidents have doubled, however, Statistics Canada noted the increase, “may reflect improvements in detection and more complete police reporting, rather than an increase in the frequency of such incidents.”
As of the second quarter of 2018, 16 per cent of Canadians reported using Cannabis in the last three months with Nova Scotians (21 per cent) and Ontarians (18 per cent) being the more frequent users. Quebecois (11 per cent) and Saskatchewan (10 per cent) people were the lowest
users.
Of the respondents, 82 per cent said they are not likely to try cannabis or increase consumption of cannabis with legalization in October 2018.
