Adam Bandt’s cannabis tweet lights a blaze of backlash

Greens leader Adam Bandt has praised school leavers who choose to smoke marijuana and avoid participating in the nation’s booming jobs market

Greens leader Adam Bandt in Melbourne. Picture: Jay Town

Greens leader Adam Bandt has come under fire after he praised school leavers who choose to smoke marijuana and avoid participating in the booming jobs market, his comments sparking backlash from mental health experts and Coalition MPs.

A day after the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported a record 366,000 new jobs in November, Mr Bandt sent a tweet congratulating year 12 graduates for completing their high school education and expressing admiration for a variety of prospective career paths and those who opted to smoke cannabis.

“Whether you want to be a lawyer, artist, miner or just smoke weed for a year or two: I’m proud of you,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday. ”This has been a bloody tough year. Props for making it.”

Adolescent psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg said Mr Bandt’s tweet was “one of the most irresponsible statements on youth mental health” he had seen in his 25 years as a practitioner and called on the Greens leader to issue an immediate retraction and apology.

“Given the association between the consumption of cannabis and serious mental health issues, this statement beggars belief,” Dr Carr-Gregg told the Weekend Australian.

“I imagine that the parents and caregivers of young people whose lives are blighted by drug-induced psychosis would be horrified.”

Health Minister Greg Hunt said Mr Bandt’s comment on marijuana use was “completely irresponsible” for a national political leader.

“It is irresponsible to promote the use of cannabis when evidence shows that it can lead to or exacerbate mental illness, especially in younger people and those with family histories of mental illness,” he told The Weekend Australian.

But Mr Bandt – who has said on the public record before that he has smoked cannabis – hit back and said Mr Hunt needed to “chill out”.

“Nothing that a politician says will change what a young person does in terms of smoking marijuana,” he said.

“We can either bury our heads in the sand, or we can accept the reality of marijuana use and proactively build policy around it, including legalisation.”

Happy 4/20. It’s beyond time to #JustLegaliseIt 💚

— Adam Bandt (@AdamBandt) April 19, 2021

Health research has revealed the close link between regular use of cannabis – the most widely used illicit drug in Australia – and mental illnesses including anxiety disorders, depression and ­psychosis.

University of NSW adjunct professor in psychiatry Vaughan Carr said establishing a causation link between cannabis use and mental illnesses such as psychosis was “not an easy question to answer”.

“There are well-established observations that there is an association between heavy cannabis use, particularly beginning early in life, and subsequent mental health problems such as depression, anxiety and psychosis,” he said.

“However, the vast majority of users of cannabis do not experience those ill effects in the long term.”

Moderate Liberal MP Katie Allen, an experienced paediatrician, said Mr Bandt’s tweet “explains a few of the Greens’ policies”.

The Greens – Australia’s third-largest political party – advocate for a progressive drug policy that focuses on reducing potential harm and adverse health, social and economic consequences of drug and substance use. The party’s website says its aims include legalising the production, sale and use of cannabis and cannabis products for recreational use and regulate the growing and possession of cannabis and cannabis-derived products for medical purposes.

The Greens hope to hold the balance of power after next year’s federal election amid the prospect of a hung parliament, and are targeting a raft of Liberal and Labor-held inner city electorates including Kooyong, Higgins and Wills in Victoria, and Ryan and Brisbane in Queensland.

At the last federal election in 2019 the party failed to boost their numbers in the lower house from one – Mr Bandt, who holds the seat of Melbourne.