Cannabis Legalization: How to Change a Policy in Only 50 Years
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This talk by Prof. Andrew Potter is part of our Winter 2020 Policy Lecture series. These academic talks are intended for McGill students, alumni and faculty.
Canada's criminal prohibition on cannabis lasted for 95 years, but we spent the last 50 years of that period engaged in a desultory attempt at reform. Why did it take half a century to change a policy that almost every major stakeholder felt was misguided?
About Andrew Potter:
Andrew Potter is an associate professor at the Max Bell School of Public Policy.
A former journalist, between 2011 and 2016 Andrew Potter was the managing editor and then editor in chief of the Ottawa Citizen, and from 2006 to 2011 he was a public affairs columnist for Maclean's Magazine. He is also a former Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. Potter is the author of The Authenticity Hoax: How We Get Lost Finding Ourselves, and the co-author, with Joseph Heath, of the best-selling book The Rebel Sell: Why the Culture Can't be Jammed.
Andrew Potter holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and did postdoctoral work at the Université de Montreal. He studied philosophy as an undergraduate at McGill, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1993.