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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Wednesday, 25 August 2004) . . Page.. 4131 ..

medical practitioners recommending cannabis use or the requirement for them to recommend doses.

Regardless of those amendments, as I have indicated previously, the government has a number of significant concerns with this bill. They are views shared by the medical community in the ACT. Whilst that is not always, in my view, a compelling argument, I believe that the merits of the argument on this occasion do warrant more serious consideration by this Assembly and that we should not take the threshold step of passing this legislation today.

MR SMYTH (Leader of the Opposition) (12.04): Mr Speaker, the opposition will also not be supporting the bill, for many of the reasons that the minister has outlined. The bill seeks to allow the use of cannabis for medical treatment. In doing so, it makes possession legal if it is to be used under medical supervision. It also, to get around the supply issue, makes it legal to grow cannabis.

The bill sets out three categories of patients for treatment. Category one is those with a terminal illness. Category two is those with serious chronic illnesses such as multiple sclerosis. Category three is for the mitigation of symptoms under any medical condition or its treatment. Under the bill, a person may be granted a licence to cultivate cannabis, with the restriction that they cannot grow a trafficable amount. In the case of both treatment and cultivation, the Chief Health Officer is the decision-maker.

The main concern that we have—and there is some work that suggests that, for people suffering terminal or chronic illness, it is possible to obtain relief through the therapeutic use of cannabis—is that the bill itself is structurally unsound. The nature of the three categories, we believe, could simply lead to doctor shopping and I certainly believe that the cultivation aspects of the bill are simply unworkable.

I think all members have received correspondence from the AMA, which is especially critical of the bill in its current form as it will expose doctors and make them potentially liable for prescribing a medication that cannot be accurately dosed. I think the minister gave the range of 7½ up to 220 units of TCH. To have something that varies 30 times makes it extremely dangerous, we believe, to therefore give doctors the right to prescribe something that they actually cannot control the strength and use of.

We also note that nabilone, a synthetic cannaboid, is now being trialled, certainly in the UK. I was led to believe that it may be being used at the hospice as part of a trial here, but I am not aware or have not been able to confirm whether that is so. Certainly, advice from the AMA is that it would rather wait for it, that is nabilone and other similar drugs, to come onto the market so that you can actually have a recommended dose or prescribe a dose that can be accurately measured.

For these reasons, we believe that the bill should not go ahead at this time. Ms Tucker has certainly indicated she would move some amendments. We do not believe that they make up for the flaws at the heart of the bill. With that in mind, the opposition will not be supporting this bill.

MS DUNDAS (12.07): Mr Speaker, I understand that Ms Tucker has been working on amendments to this bill and I think that they address a number of the concerns that have

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