Page 3250 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 21 September 1994
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the drug version rather than the non-drug version - cannabis in the version with the Delta 9 THC - will relieve pressure on the ocular nerve. We have to ask ourselves, "Can we really stand by and not allow people who are going to be sent blind to use cannabis?". I think this is a question that we need to deal with here and, particularly, we need to give the power to our Minister for Health to provide exemptions in this issue. Even the United States, the bastion of prohibition, does provide exemptions. I have met the first person in the United States who was given an exemption to use cannabis because of glaucoma.
It does also assist people in terms of serving as the anti-emetic that I described for the Grinspoon child, as far as reducing and alleviating nausea from those treatments. Certainly, we know that AIDS patients who use cannabis and who smoke cannabis do not waste as much and have a reasonable appetite. It is an issue that we should also deal with. There is, also, a series of other medical benefits of the use of cannabis - not just the version of industrial cannabis that Mr Stevenson is talking about but, indeed, cannabis in this form.
It is quite clear, Mr Deputy Speaker, that there is a changing attitude in Australia to the prohibition of cannabis - in fact, to prohibition generally, but particularly to the prohibition of cannabis. I am sure that, when the Ministerial Council on Drugs Strategy meets in Canberra next week and considers the report on cannabis that has been prepared by the Australian task force, they will realise that some of the evidence presented on the ill effects of cannabis has been wildly exaggerated. Many of them can be traced back to Dr Gabriel Nahas, a professor from the United States whom the Americans describe as a warrior on the war on drugs. But just published in Drug and Alcohol Review is a critique of an article that he had published in the Australian Medical Journal, where he is cited as misrepresenting 28 of the 30-odd references that he used in that paper. That kind of misrepresentation, that kind of dishonesty, is what leads to driving prohibition.
MR STEFANIAK (4.07): When Mr Stevenson started speaking in this debate, some members probably thought that he had been off with the fairies. When Leonardo da Vinci, in the sixteenth century, was talking about flying machines, everyone thought that he was off with the fairies. But he was ahead of his time. Perhaps Mr Stevenson is just getting us to look at reinventing the wheel. As far as the Liberal Party is concerned, we looked at Mr Stevenson's matter of public importance and thought, "This is not necessarily as silly as some people might think it is". Mr Stevenson and, I think, Mr Moore quoted from a paper entitled A Brief Summary of the Uses of Hemp. I have had a look at it. I could not completely agree with some of it; but much of it appears to be quite factual and to make a lot of sense. As Mr Stevenson has done, it goes through the historical use of hemp. It states that, up until the 1880s, hemp was used effectively in rope, sails and clothing. That continued to be the case, with various strains and various synthetics added, well into the twentieth century. Mr Stevenson has a cannabis jacket, which he flashed to show us that it carries a "cannabis" label. I think that Mr Lamont tried to see whether you could smoke it. Page 6 of a handout on the uses of hemp reads, in part:
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