Page 4572 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 6 December 1994
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Mrs Carnell: It is up to you to approve it.
MR CONNOLLY: Indeed, that is likely to be what would happen. So, we do not need these silly proposals, which are all linked in to consumption of cannabis leaf. The Department of Health has been getting ready to start talking to the Commonwealth - and the people who are the key players in this are the Therapeutic Goods Administration - about whether we can get doctors who are keen to do the research. I think we probably can. I think we will find the doctors who are interested in this research. But there may be ways of allowing that research to be conducted with control quantities of Delta 9 tetrahydrocannabinol, that is, control quantities of the active ingredient. For the record, Mrs Carnell made a grubby little interjection, "Mr Connolly does not care about the pain of cancer sufferers", or material like that. By that sort of statement, Mrs Carnell, you are being judged out in the community and found wanting. That sort of material, Mrs Carnell, is beneath the dignity of an Opposition leader, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I will leave that for you to live with.
If you had a doctor looking at potential pain relief benefits for cancer cases or advanced AIDS cases, we would be trialling five milligrams a day on one person, maybe 10 milligrams a day for another person. You would do those serious controlled clinical trials. Again, this article in the British Pharmaceutical Journal makes the point that a problem with cannabis is that it is present in the bloodstream for a long time. The point here is that he says that the potential for drug interactions with cannabis is "horrendous". This writer is concerned that there has been very little research done on how cannabis can interact with other pharmacological agents. So, there are lots of questions that need to be addressed, and they will be addressed not by politicians, hopefully, but by doctors and research scientists. That is the way we think the proposal should go. (Extension of time granted)
The sensible and prudent course of action for this Assembly, having rescinded the hasty and ill-considered legislation of last week, is to reject Mrs Carnell's hasty and ill-considered amendment of today that we have only just seen and to reject Mr Moore's amendments to it. We think that going down this path of researching the potential benefits of the active ingredient in cannabis as a medical agent is a quite admirable goal. As the Chief Minister said, we are not ascribing bad motives to the idea of looking at medical research. That is what I said on Wednesday of last week. You could have saved yourselves all this angst, you could have saved yourselves looking like dills, if you had listened to what I said last week. I said, "Whoa, let us be careful. We are going into uncharted waters here". We should not pass another hasty amendment, because you will just invite the same round of criticism again.
Mr Moore says that this does nothing. Mr Refshauge says that it may make some improvement. You seem to think it is terrific. My concern is that I have had it for only half an hour, so I really do not know what it means; but, in particular, it does not address the issue that I think is a very important one and that my medical advisers tell me is a very important one: If you are going to do serious trials, as opposed to random human guineapig experiments, you need to know the quantity of the drug you are trialling on the person.
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