Tax revenue from pot sales should be invested in mental health, addictions services: advocacy group

Juris Graney

The province should reinvest all tax revenue from the sale of legal cannabis in Alberta into addiction and mental health services, an advocacy group says.

Sateen Werner, a graduate student at the University of Alberta and member of Student Advocates for Public Health, told a forum Wednesday the legalization of cannabis and the new revenue stream has the potential to address the “concerning gaps” in the province’s “underfunded and under-resourced” addictions and mental health services in Alberta.

According to a 2015 government report, just six per cent of health-care spending goes to addiction and mental health programs.

Sateen said, based on calculations of Alberta’s population and comparisons with U.S. states with legal cannabis such as Colorado, the province could potentially see $50 million in added revenue in the first year of legalization and up to $100 million in the second year.

Unmet need

Cameron Wild, professor of socio-behavioural sciences with the University of Alberta School of Public Health, said that money is desperately needed for health support programs, since about 20 per cent of adult Albertans are currently living with mental health or addictions issues.

“And of them, about half report they either don’t get service at all or don’t get enough service when they seek care,” he said.

“This is an astoundingly high level of unmet service need that would be intolerable in virtually every other area of health. We don’t talk about unmet service needs in cancer or diabetes in this way, because addiction and mental-health issues have traditionally been the black sheep in the health-care discussion.

“I don’t think we have ever been in such a historically good spot to begin real, serious discussion about how we are going to strategize and use revenues more creatively than we have in the past to address these pressing mental health problems.”

Who gets first dibs?

Investing 100 per cent of tax revenue into health services may prove to be a lofty ambition, but the suggestion a cannabis-funded revenue stream should be directed into a special pool that would give addictions and health services first dibs before being doled out to other services is not unheard of.

In fact, public health, education and addictions support has been at the forefront in almost every example of legalization of recreational cannabis in the United States.

In Washington, 50 per cent of all cannabis-related revenue is mandated to go back into the health-care system, and in Colorado, the first $40 million of retail tax revenue each year goes towards renovating, upgrading or building new schools in the state.

The federal government’s task force report into the legalization of cannabis in Canada also made clear recommendations to ensure that revenue should be used as a “source of funding for administration, education, research and enforcement.”

Earlier this year, the Liberal government said it wanted to table legislation to legalize and regulate the recreational use of pot this spring.