PENINGTON ADVOCACY FOR CANNABIS LEGALISATION GOES AGAINST ALL CURRENT EVIDENCE
. . . Australian drug policy organisation wants to see more drug use
Drug Free Australia is drawing attention to the fact that Melbourne-based Penington Institute’s cost-benefit analysis of its proposed cannabis legalisation, purportedly to benefit public health in Australia, will do everything to degrade public health in this country, as detailed in the Australian Taskforce for Drug Prevention’s (of which DFA is a member) formal response document to the Penington report.
The Penington Institute is a drug policy organisation most notably entrusted by Federal Government to produce annual reports on official drug overdose mortality statistics for Australia. This gives it a particular aura of credibility and trust. However, in reality, its role tacitly positions it as a partner organisation involved in the national effort to eliminate, or at least, to contain illicit drug use and its associated harms and mortality. Most Australians would be highly concerned that it is now promoting the increasing of drug use.
Their latest July 2025 report on cannabis advocates for the legalisation of recreational cannabis use on a regulated model similar to alcohol and tobacco. This is comparable to the following scenario - imagine a prevention organisation such as the Heart Foundation advocating for heavily reduced restrictions on tobacco manufacturers and retailers for the social benefit of sharply increasing government revenues. Such removals of constraints clearly ignore the very reason those restraints were created – that the substance causes unacceptable disease and mortality burdens that outweigh any income benefit. The Penington Institute’s document does the same – pretending there is no social or medical disease and mortality burden – and calculating only the financial gains for government.
Just the health costs for cancer arising from cannabis use alone entirely annul any tax benefit for governments. Their 2024 cost-benefit analysis does not include the findings of around 60 peer-reviewed medical journal population studies, mostly published between 2021 and 2024, showing that cannabis is causal in 33 different cancers, doubling the number caused by tobacco and in the US creating a greater medical burden than tobacco. 43%, or $59 billion of the total $137 billion of Australian smoking-related costs in 2015/16 was from cancers. Sharply rising cannabis use, the inevitable correlate of cannabis legalisation (see Figure 2 on page 9), along with rising medical cannabis use, will vastly increase the costs of cannabis-related cancers alone. This substantially weights the costs AGAINST the Penington Institute’s proposed benefits. This does not count the social and medical costs of other deficits caused by cannabis - birth defects, child cancers, psychosis, depression and suicide and violence, all heavily evidenced in peer-reviewed medical journal studies. All of these deficits also create Australian jobs in the social and medical industries, a focus of the Penington report, but for all the wrong reasons.
Other key assumptions of the Penington report are the very opposite of available evidence. Their claim that legalisation puts the black market out of business is totally opposed to the realities in Colorado and California. In reality legalisation only increased black market cannabis grows. This is via an economy which creates a better cover for criminals, and where the high costs of regulating cannabis creates a strong market for the cheaper black market product, just like the illegal ‘chop-chop’ tobacco market thriving here in Australia. The Taskforce response document outlines that California’s black market is larger than the legal one. This document is highly commended.
Drug Free Australia would also challenge the Penington Institute to open its accounts to public view to demonstrate no donations from a very wealthy cannabis industry.