Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, I will be supporting this motion. Mr. Chairman, we did hear a lot about the development of the youth, the growth of the brain, I think. We had, I think we had a couple of associations, nurses' associations, that came and spoke to us, plus there's research and there's other supporting documentation that the brain continues to develop. The brain continues to grow to the age of 25. A person's physical body gets to grow up in height maybe until they're 18, maybe 19, and so on, but the brain will continue to grow until a person is 25 years old. I guess is the best type of medical research we have.
I, too, wanted to look at ways to reduce the consumption by people between the age of 19 and 25 as much as possible. Initially, I wanted to support that we legalize marijuana at 25 years old, and then, I started talking to some of the people. I talked about my work and so on, and one person came and said, "Don't do it." Don't impose a rule where the minimum age is 25 years old because you're going to create a whole bunch of criminals. People that have never been in trouble with the law that are 19 years old, 20 years old, and they are smoking. They aren't chronic smokers, but if they're not allowed to possess marijuana at all, you could end up being the 21-year-old person that's never been in trouble will all of a sudden end up with a criminal record because they're possessing marijuana, something that they've been smoking for awhile.
I started thinking about this system of having a two-tier possession system where individuals between the age of 19 and 25 would only possess 10 grams as opposed to 30 grams in the overall. That's in the legislation from 19 and up. We knew that wasn't going to prevent people from smoking, but we thought that just to have it against the law for them to have in their possession any more than 10 grams, it's just inconvenient enough that maybe they would smoke less, and it would have less of an impact on their brain development.
I have actually witnessed people younger than 19 years old who have smoked, and I have seen the impacts. I was surprised because, up until I've seen it, until I've seen a 16-year-old boy in action after smoking marijuana, I didn't really believe that it had any impact on the brain development of a young person. Once I learned that, and then when we got to this legislation, and we got witnesses that spoke on it, I thought that this would just be enough of a deterrence to maybe change the habit just a bit, just to lower it just a bit, and it costs really nothing to do. It lowers the amount. It's a bit of a deterrence, and it doesn't really cost us anything. It's not really creating individuals that, maybe people don't want to carry more than 10 grams around anyway, but that's another matter altogether. I will support this motion. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.