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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3887 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

I move:

Mr Speaker, with my colleagues, I found this an absorbing inquiry. It was really very interesting. I am one member of that committee who had his views modified somewhat as a result of all that we heard and learned. I came to understand that cannabis is a drug not without harmful effects, and that had not been as clearly impressed on my mind beforehand. In future I will certainly pay more attention to research about the health impacts of cannabis use, especially potential negative impacts consequent, particularly, on heavy usage.

I think it is fair to say, from what we heard and read, that the impacts of cannabis use are not yet fully understood. Long - term research is needed to make accurate assessments of that impact. It is a very complex drug. There are many compounds contained in it, and it has many different effects.

It is also more difficult to assess the effects on health because of the sanctions against its use, so it is not easy to get the research data. Also, cannabis is often used with other drugs such as alcohol and tobacco, and sometimes with harder drugs. So there remains a dispute about the effect, compounded again by the complex nature of people themselves. That means that each person's reaction may be a little different from someone else's.

The report summarises what we find to be current knowledge of the health effects of cannabis. Our committee was quite interested in any relationship of cannabis use to schizophrenia. Obviously, this would be an area of concern, and there is a deal of anecdotal information in the community about the effects or otherwise. There seems to be some suggestion that cannabis use might worsen schizophrenic symptoms in some people. If the tendency was there, cannabis use might exaggerate that and worsen those symptoms. Yet, on the other side, there is also some comment that some sufferers find that cannabis use reduces the intensity of some of their symptoms. The most obvious health risk has to do with respiratory factors because you are inhaling smoke.

There is much work to be done yet on the health effects of cannabis. It seems clear that some people do fall into a dependence on cannabis. Some people are quite heavily reliant on it, and we found as we spoke to various groups that some people want to get off that dependence. One of the groups we saw was the ACT government's Effective Weed Control Group. I thought, and I think my colleagues did too, that they seemed to be pretty well switched on. They could use the language of users. They seemed to be able to touch their users. It seemed to us that the program they were running was a pretty effective one. We have a recommendation for some evaluation of that service, and we would think, in the end, some expansion of it.

There is a view in some areas that cannabis might be a gateway drug; that is, it leads people on to taking more serious drugs, such as heroin, for example. We gave careful thought to that. I certainly did. It is the case, no doubt, that some people will try anything and everything. If that is the case they would well try cannabis and move on to other more harmful drugs.

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