Page 4327 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 30 November 1994
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we would be willing to look again at the whole situation. At this stage, all the evidence we have is that the current legislation is working quite well and is ensuring that young people do not end up in gaol for simple cannabis offences. We do not believe that that is appropriate. I find it very difficult to understand any government suggesting that, for a simple offence of possession of a small amount of cannabis, it is appropriate for somebody to end up in gaol. The most recent evidence suggests that over 30 per cent of Australians have at some stage smoked cannabis and a substantially higher percentage of young people are smoking cannabis at least semi-regularly. If that is the case, we would need very big gaols if we were suggesting that that was an appropriate approach. I believe that, from all reports, including reports from the police, the current approach is working fairly efficiently.
We support the Government's approach and Mr Moore's approach on paragraph (d), which suggests that self-administration should be treated in exactly the same way as possession. Obviously, this was an oversight in the initial legislation. It is patently ridiculous to suggest that possessing should be treated somehow differently from smoking the substance. We will not be supporting the reduction in the penalty from $100 to $40. We have not had any particular evidence to suggest that $100 is inappropriate. We believe that $100 is an appropriate amount of money, and to bring it down to $40 simply would be ridiculous. If it could be shown that $100 was causing huge problems for people, I am sure that some discretion could be shown.
The interesting amendment is the final one which Mr Connolly spent a large percentage of his time speaking about. That is to allow medical practitioners engaged in medical research to certify in writing that people can possess a small amount of cannabis for that purpose. Cannabis is a plant. I do not suppose that that is a stunning revelation for anybody. Everybody would be aware that a very large percentage of life-saving drugs that currently are used regularly also come from plant sources - aspirin from willow bark, digitalis for heart purposes from foxglove, the list goes on and on. There have been, I understand, over 6,000 trials of cannabis around the world looking at its medical use, so it is not as though this is right out of the blue and a bit weird. The fact is that cannabis has been trialled on many occasions to look at how it could be used for medical purposes.
From my reading and from that of many others, there is very good evidence that its use in glaucoma is positive, taking into account that a large percentage of blindness in our community is caused by glaucoma. We have some treatments; but many are not all that effective for some people, particularly people with complicating factors such as asthma or high blood pressure, when some of the current treatments are contra-indicated. We know that cannabis has been used quite effectively in an overseas environment for terminal AIDS and cancer patients. It also seems to have a very appropriate effect in terms of nausea for people in terminal stages of AIDS and cancer. Nausea is one of the major problems for people on various drug therapies in that stage of these conditions, and many of the pain-killers we currently use make that nausea worse rather than better.
It appears from at least preliminary research that cannabis does not go down that track. It helps the nausea and helps the pain. If that is the case, it would seem totally inappropriate, just because this particular substance has been part of an abuse problem around the world, to rule it out from being used medically, for us to be somehow terribly worried about trialling what is just a plant for very important medical purposes.
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