Dr. Tony George & Dr. Benedikt Fischer

Panel on Marijuana

Dr. Tony George is Chief of the Addictions Division, Clinician Scientist in the Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute and Head of the Biobehavioural Addictions and Concurrent Disorders Research Laboratory (BACDRL) at CAMH. He is also Professor and Co-Director of the Division of Brain and Therapeutics in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. He has over 220 peer-reviewed publications, book chapters and other reports, and is a Fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP). He is Deputy Editor of ACNP’s journal Neuropsychopharmacology, and contributed the chapter on Nicotine and Tobacco to Cecil Textbook of Medicine in the 2011 and 2015 editions. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Canadian Council on Substance Abuse (CCSA), co-editing its report on Cannabis and Youth in 2015. Dr. George completed his undergraduate and medical school training at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, graduating with his M.D. degree in 1992, and then completed psychiatry residency training (1992-96) and a fellowship in Translational Neuroscience (1996-98) at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. From 2008 to 2012, he was Clinical Director of the CAMH Schizophrenia Program, and from 2012 to 2016, he was Chief of the Schizophrenia Division and Medical Director of the Complex Mental Illness Program at CAMH. He was also the inaugural holder of the Chair in Addiction Psychiatry at the University of Toronto from 2006 to 2012.

Dr. Fischer obtained his doctorate in Criminology from the University of Toronto (1998). He started his academic research career as a Scientist (1996) at the then Addiction Research Foundation, where – upon the formation of CAMH – he was a Co-Head of the Public Health and Regulatory Policy Research Section (2003-2006). Starting in 2006, Dr. Fischer held primary academic positions in British Columbia for a decade, as Professor at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, where he was Director of the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addictions (CARMHA), from 2008 to 2014. In 2015, Dr. Fischer returned to his principal appointments in Toronto, concretely as a Senior Scientist, Institute for Mental Health Policy Research, CAMH, with his primary academic appointment in the Department of Psychiatry, with additional appointments at the Institute of Medical Science and the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto.