Report Launch: The Social Impact of Cannabis Legalisation
Our new report, The Social Impact of Cannabis Legalisation, explores how cannabis reform can shape lives, livelihoods, and the law
Hanway is proud to announce the launch of First Wednesdays’ latest report: ‘The Social Impact of Cannabis Legalisation: How cannabis reform can shape lives, livelihoods and the law’.
The report is sponsored by Artemis Growth Partners, and authored by Hanway Associates in collaboration with Pagefield communications and Loveblood creative. We have published this report for members of the European cannabis industry, bringing local context to discussions that are often dominated by a North American centric framing. To amplify its message we have launched in partnership with key influencers Volteface (UK), Cannavigia (Switzerland), Prohibition Partners (UK & US) and Krautinvest (Germany).
In the report, we explore:
The harms of existing cannabis laws
Cannabis is Europe’s most widely-consumed drug, used by over 22 million adults each year. Cannabis possession offences are the biggest driver of drug-related police interactions by a significant margin, far exceeding offences logged for trafficking and all other drugs. We dive into the consequences of cannabis prohibition across Europe for users, marginalised communities, and the complex web of violence and coercion fuelled by large-scale criminal supply.
Ways to reduce cannabis prohibition harms
The report explores solutions from deprioritizing low-level cannabis offences through to legalisation and expungement of past convictions. With several European countries exploring non-commercial routes of cannabis reform, home-grow and social clubs become a powerful way to provide legal, non-violent sources of cannabis and a route for existing ‘hobby’ growers into legal production.
Europe’s Blind Spots
Whether cannabis law enforcement is discriminatory or racially-disproportionate is often dismissed by Europeans as a predominantly North American concern. While we believe that Europeans are wrong to dismiss this issue, the way that racial discrimination is measured across Europe - or more accurately, isn’t - presents a fundamental challenge to knowing if and where discrimination takes place, and in delivering future policies to address it.
When it comes to the topic of discrimination, Europe has a significant blind-spot: An intentional lack of ethnicity-based data collection. In most countries, non-discrimination principles make collecting citizens’ ethnic and racial information (and making public policy based on it) illegal.
As a result, most European countries lack the ability to identify, track or analyse the extent to which racial and identity-based discrimination takes place across any facet of society - from health and education outcomes, to policing, drug-related and criminal justice interactions. Only the UK and Ireland collect ethnicity data and apply this breakdown to public statistics.
This fundamentally challenges the view that racial discrimination in cannabis policing is a uniquely North American problem - most European countries simply don’t have the data available to either prove or disprove the hypothesis. Legalising countries are therefore tasked with building effective future cannabis frameworks without fully understanding whether identity-based discrimination and harms are currently taking place and, if so, to what degree.
What the data does show
We review cannabis statistics and case studies from the UK, France and Germany, revealing reluctance throughout top public institutions to substantively engage with questions of racial discrimination.
Where the data does exist, it points to entrenched and systemic patterns of discrimination: Across England and Wales, Black individuals are 7.7 times more likely to be stopped and searched for drug-related reasons than White individuals, while Asian, mixed and other ethnic groups are 2.7 times more likely, despite using cannabis at a rate comparable to or less than White individuals.
New data from First Wednesdays also reveals that between 2019 and 2021, London’s Metropolitan Police took the drastic step of strip-searching 1,380 children held in custody on suspicion of a Class B drug offence. 44% of those children were Black, despite representing just 19% of Greater London’s under-18 population.
What can we learn from social equity schemes?
So far, European proposals to legalise cannabis have lacked a focus on social equity. Will Europe give priority to groups negatively affected by cannabis prohibition and those with cannabis-related criminal records? At the moment, it seems that Europeans are still debating whether these people should even be allowed to participate in legal commercial cannabis markets, let alone be prioritised.
In the US, social equity schemes have become a prominent, albeit imperfect feature of state-level cannabis reform. Using their stories and lessons to spark questions and ideas about ‘Europe’s future’, we journey through the social equity process through the words of those intimately involved, including entrepreneurs and policymakers from California, Michigan, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
While not a direct proposition for Europe, these schemes provide a trove of insight into designing and implementing functional, inclusive legal frameworks, and the tools, initiatives and institutions that can best support people from a range of backgrounds in entering the cannabis industry.
Building an ethical industry
To conclude, we make the case for a new legal industry where ethical business practice and positive social impact is baked in from the get-go. Highlighting real examples of poor corporate behaviour that already takes place in the legal industry, we lay out a series of practical initiatives for businesses to adopt and government policies for industry operators and participants to advocate for.
Through this report we hope to shift the European narrative on the impact and impetus of cannabis reform, and the importance of building new legal frameworks and company policies that maximise a positive social impact. We know that this topic is controversial to some, and can trigger strong opinions. But if we can shine even a small ray of light and spark discussion on this topic, we will have achieved our goals.