Drug and Alcohol Review (2000) 19, 265•269

SPECIAL SECTION:
CANNABIS EXPIATION IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA

The effects of the Cannabis Expiation

Notice system on the prevalence of
cannabis use in South Australia: evidence
from the National Drug Strategy
Household Surveys 1985•95
NEIL DONNELLY1, WAYNE HALL1 & PAUL CHRISTIE2
1
National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales and
2
Drug and Alcohol Services Council, South Australia
Abstract
This study sought to examine the impact of the Cannabis Expiation Notice (CEN) scheme on the
prevalence of lifetime and weekly cannabis use in South Australia. Data from five National Drug
Strategy Household Surveys between 1985 and 1995 were examined to test for differences in trends
in self-reported: (1) lifetime cannabis use; and (2) current weekly cannabis use, after controlling for
age and gender, between South Australia and the other states and territories. Between 1985 and
1995, rates of lifetime cannabis use increased in SA from 26% to 36%. There were also significant
increases in Victoria (from 26% to 32%), Tasmania (from 21% to 33%) and New South Wales (from
26% to 33%). The increase in South Australia was significantly greater than the average increase
throughout the rest of Australia, but the other Australian states differed in their rates of change.
Victoria and Tasmania had similar rates of increase to South Australia; New South Wales,
Queensland and Western Australia showed lower rates of increase; and the Northern Territory and
the Australian Capital Territory had high rates that did not change during the period. There was no
statistically significant difference between SA and the rest of Australia in the rate of increase in
weekly cannabis use. While there was a greater increase in self-reported lifetime cannabis use in
South Australia between 1985 and 1995 than in the average of the other Australian jurisdictions it
is unlikely that this increase is due to the CEN system, because similar increases occurred in
Tasmania and Victoria (where there was no change in the legal status of cannabis use), and there was

Neil Donnelly Bsc(Hons), MPH; Wayne Hall PhD, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney,
2052, Australia; Paul Christie BMedSci(Hons), GDPH, Drug and Alcohol Services Council, 161 Greenhill Road, Parkside, SA, 5063,
Australia. Correspondence to Prof. Wayne Hall, Director, National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, University of New South Wales,
Sydney, 2052, Australia.
Received and accepted for publication April 2000

ISSN 0959•5235 print/ISSN 1465•3370 online/00/030265•05 © Australian Professional Society on Alcohol and Other Drugs
266 Neil Donnelly et al.
no increase in the rate of weekly cannabis use in South Australia over the same period. [Donnelly N,
Hall W, Christie P. The effects of the Cannabis Expiation Notice system on the prevalence of cannabis use in
South Australia evidence from the National Drug Strategy Household Surveys 1985•95. Drug Alcohol Rev
2000;19:265•269]
Key words: cannabis use, prevalence, decriminalization, South Australia.
Introduction
Between 1977 and 1996 a succession of Australian
inquiries and reports have recommended that criminal
penalties for the use of cannabis by young adults be
removed (e.g. Senate Standing Committee on Social
Welfare, 1977 [1]; South Australian Royal Commis-
sion into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, 1978 [2];
Queensland Criminal Justice Commission, 1993 [3];
National Taskforce on Cannabis [4]; and the Victorian
Premiers Drug Advisory Council [5]. These inquiries
have generally advocated replacing criminal penalties
for possession and use of cannabis with civil penalties
(or —partial decriminalization˜).
In April 1987 the South Australian government
introduced the Cannabis Expiation Notice (CEN)
scheme under which it ceased to be a criminal offence
to possess small quantities of cannabis (up to 100 g of
cannabis or 20 g of cannabis resin) for personal use.
Cannabis users who were apprehended with such
quantities would receive an expiation notice. Criminal
penalties for commercial cultivation and trafficking of
cannabis were increased.
This paper presents analyses of cannabis prevalence
data in order to determine whether the CEN scheme
might have resulted in changes in cannabis use in
South Australia. The paper updates and extends earlier
analyses of population survey data on cannabis use by
including data on the prevalence of cannabis use from
the 1995 National Drug Household survey (con-
ducted for the National Drug Strategy). This extends
the time•series data on prevalence rates for compar-
isons between South Australia and the rest of Australia
to the decade 1985 to 1995.
Methods
Survey methods
Since 1985, the National Drug Strategy (formerly the
National Campaign Against Drug Abuse) has con-
ducted five national household surveys of drug use
among people aged 14 years and over. Over the 10
years there were changes in sampling, questionnaire
content and method of administration (see Donnelly &
Hall [6]; Makkai & McAllister [7, 8]; Donnelly,
Hall & Christie [9]). The degree of anonymity that
respondents were allowed when answering questions
about their illicit drug use increased over time.
Because of the methodological differences between the
NDS surveys, conclusions about the reasons for
changes in cannabis use must be drawn cautiously.
Our analyses assume that the effects of any changes in
sampling and method of questioning are the same
across jurisdictions. This is reasonable, since the same
methods were used in each jurisdiction in each year.
We compared changes in rates of cannabis use in
South Australia with those the rest of Australia. For the
present update, we also compared changes in rates in
South Australia with changes in Tasmania and
Victoria, two jurisdictions that had shown a similar
increase in rates of cannabis use between 1985 and
1993.
A series of logistic regression analyses was used to
assess trends in lifetime and weekly cannabis use.
These included: (1) analyses of changes in rates of
lifetime and weekly cannabis use within jurisdictions
(adjusting for changes in sex and age between
samples); (2) analyses comparing different jurisdic-
tions in rates of change in lifetime and weekly cannabis
use; and (3) additional comparisons of rates of change
in lifetime and weekly cannabis use between South
Australia and the jurisdictions that had shown similar
rates of change over the period 1985 to 1993
(Tasmania and Victoria). These analyses adjusted for
differences in the age and sex composition of samples
in the different jurisdictions.
Results
Changes in rates within jurisdictions
All jurisdictions, except the ACT and the Northern
Territory, showed a linear increase in the rate of
 Effects of the CEN system in South Australia 267

Table 1. Adjusted % of ever having used cannabis for each jurisdiction 1985•95

1985 1988 1991 1993 1995 Trend

South Australia 25.7 24.5 31.5 37.4 36.3 ***

Tasmania 21.1 • 23.6 30.2 32.9 ***
Victoria 26.4 23.1 28.2 31.2 32.0 ***
New South Wales 25.6 29.7 31.5 33.0 33.0 **
Western Australia 31.9 34.7 36.0 36.6 37.0 *
Queensland 26.6 24.0 27.0 30.5 29.5 *
Australian Capital Territory 35.0 • 41.3 42.5 39.1 NS
Northern Territory 44.1 • 47.2 49.8 52.1 NS

*** p < 0.001; ** p < 0.01; * p < 0.05.

lifetime cannabis use between 1985 and 1995. The rate
varied between the jurisdictions, with the greatest rates
of increase in South Australia, Tasmania and Victoria
(see Table 1).
In the ACT and the Northern Territory, there was
no significant change in the rates of lifetime use of
cannabis over the survey period. Both jurisdictions had
a lifetime prevalence rate that was consistently higher
than the remaining states. The Northern Territory had
the highest rate of cannabis use in Australia through-
out the period: about half of Northern Territorians
reported that they had tried cannabis compared to
around a third of adults in the rest of Australia. The
ACT had the second highest rates throughout the
period. The rate of lifetime cannabis use in South
Australia in 1995 (36%) was in the middle of the rates
in other jurisdictions (32% to 52%).
There was a sharp increase in the prevalence of
weekly cannabis use in Tasmania between 1991 and
1993, a trend that continued in the 1995 survey (see
Table 2). In South Australia, there was an increase in
weekly use between 1988 and 1991 but no change in
rate since then. The increase between 1988 and 1991
is of uncertain significance because the South Aus-
tralian sample in 1988 comprised only 193 people.
None of the other jurisdictions have shown any change
in rates of weekly use over the period 1988 to 1995.
Comparisons between jurisdictions
Lifetime cannabis use among persons aged 14 years and
over. When year was represented as a linear trend term,
the rate of increase in South Australia was significantly
greater than the rest of Australia (at the 5% level of

Table 2. Adjusted % of weekly cannabis usage within each jurisdiction 1988B1995

1988 1991 1993 1995 Overall chi-square

Tasmania • 1.6 5.3 6.8 *

Western Australia 8.0 6.5 4.7 8.9 NS
South Australia 2.9 7.0 6.5 4.9 NS
Australian Capital Territory • 3.7 6.2 3.2 NS
Queensland 2.5 3.6 3.4 4.1 NS
Northern Territory • 10.4 9.0 10.5 NS
New South Wales 4.3 4.5 3.7 4.3 NS
Victoria 3.7 3.1 3.5 3.5 NS

Overall rather than trend Chi-square used due to lack of linearity of rates over time.
268 Neil Donnelly et al.
significance) (x2 = 4.9, df = 1, p < 0.05). As in our
previous analysis, the states that had not decriminalized
differed in their rates of change in lifetime cannabis
use. There were no differences in the rate of change
between South Australia and Tasmania or Victoria.
Weekly cannabis use among people aged 14 years and
over. There was a near-statistically significant inter-
action between jurisdiction and survey in the logistic
regression analysis that compared rates of change in
weekly cannabis use in South Australia with those in
the rest of Australia. This was due probably to a
marked increase in rates of weekly cannabis use in
South Australia between 1988 and 1991. Since then
the rate in South Australia has dropped, so that the
average change across the time period was comparable
to that in the rest of Australia. Caution needs to
exercised in interpreting this result because the rate of
weekly use in South Australia in 1988 was derived
from a sample of only 193 people.
Discussion
There has been an increase in the prevalence of
lifetime use of cannabis use in most Australian states
between 1985 and 1995. Similar increases in cannabis
use and more approving attitudes towards cannabis
use among young people have recently been reported
in the United States, Canada and parts of Europe
where there have not been any changes in legal
penalties for cannabis use [10]. The rate of increase in
South Australia over this period was greater than the
rate of increase for Australia as a whole in Australians
aged 14 years and over but it did not differ from that
in Tasmania and Victoria. The rate of lifetime cannabis
use in South Australia in 1995 was in the middle of the
range of rates in the rest of the Australian states; nor
was there any increase in the rate of weekly cannabis
use in South Australia over the same period. In the
latter case our confidence in the absence of a
statistically significant increase must be qualified
because of the smaller sample sizes in these analyses.
It would be unwise to attribute the greater increase
in self-reported lifetime cannabis use in South Aus-
tralia to the introduction of the CEN system. First, the
difference in rate of increase, which is quite small,
could reflect a greater willingness to report cannabis
use by survey respondents in South Australia. If, for
example, the legal consequences of minor cannabis
offence are perceived to be much less serious in South
Australia than in the other states, this could produce a
spuriously higher rate of self-reported cannabis use in
South Australia. The current study cannot determine
whether this is a plausible explanation of the small
differences in rates of lifetime cannabis use between
South Australia and the other jurisdictions.
Secondly, the rate of change in lifetime cannabis use
differed as much between jurisdictions that retained
criminal penalties as it did between these jurisdictions
and South Australia. The rate of increase in lifetime
cannabis use in South Australia between 1985 and
1995, for example, was the same as that in Tasmania
and Victoria. New South Wales, Western Australia and
Queensland, all of which retained criminal penalties
for minor cannabis offences, showed smaller rates of
increase. The only jurisdictions that did not show any
increase were the Northern Territory and the Aus-
tralian Capital Territory which had higher rates of
lifetime and weekly cannabis use in 1985, and that
remained higher than the other states throughout
period 1985 to 1995.
The absence of any evidence of an increase in
weekly cannabis use in South Australia between 1985
and 1995 indicates that, if there has been a greater
increase in lifetime cannabis use in South Australia,
then this has not led to any large increase in weekly
cannabis among adults in South Australia.
Thirdly, these results are consistent with analyses of
American experience with partial decriminalization of
cannabis use. Single [11] reviewed the effects of
marijuana decriminalization in 11 US states in which
criminal penalties for minor cannabis offences were
removed in the early 1970s. In California and Ohio,
surveys before and after decriminalization showed that
cannabis use increased, but this did not occur at a
greater rate than states that had not decriminalized
cannabis. Single [11] also used data from two large
US national surveys of drug use in the 1970s to
compare rates of cannabis use in states that had and
had not decriminalized cannabis. He found that the
prevalence of cannabis use increased in all states, with
a larger increase in those states that had not decrim-
inalized [11]. A similar analysis of the US Monitoring
the Future surveys of high school seniors during the
1970s found no difference in trends in cannabis use
between states that had and had not decriminalized
cannabis use [12].
More recently, MacCoun & Reuter [13] have
analysed the impact of Dutch cannabis policies on
rates of cannabis use among adolescents and young
adults in the Netherlands. They concluded that
removing criminal penalties for personal use in 1976

did not have any detectable effect on rates of cannabis
use among adolescents between 1976 and 1984 [13].
Conclusions
The rate of increase in lifetime cannabis use in South
Australia between 1985 and 1995 has been marginally
greater than the average rate observed in the other
jurisdictions over the same period. However, it would
be premature to conclude that the introduction of the
CEN system has increased rates of lifetime cannabis
use in South Australia. There was as much variation in
rates of cannabis use between jurisdictions that
retained criminal penalties as there was between these
jurisdictions and South Australia.
If the CEN system has had any effect, it has been
a small increase in the number of adults who are
prepared to try (or prepared to report that they have
tried) cannabis. There is no evidence to date that the
CEN system in South Australia has increased levels of
regular cannabis use. These results are broadly in
accord with our earlier analysis of trends in cannabis
use in Australia between 1985 and 1993 [14] and with
the results of similar analyses in the United States [15,
11] and the Netherlands [13]. Further analysis of
Australian trends will be possible with data from the
1998 National Drug Household Survey. Such analyses
should take into account the prevalence of cannabis
use in the two other jurisdictions which introduced
expiation schemes for minor cannabis offences (Aus-
tralian Capital Territory in 1992, and Northern
Territory in 1996).
References
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