Page 2158 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 August 2014
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The final grant of a permit will be determined by the ACT government’s Chief Health Officer. A person would essentially possess a licence to use cannabis, which would last for a year at most before needing renewal.
The legislation establishes three tiers of applicant. Category 1 applicants are people with a terminal illness. Category 2 applications are for the mitigation of symptoms of serious diseases or conditions which are listed in the legislation. Category 3 applications are for the mitigation of other medical conditions, or their treatment. These may be any number of chronic and debilitating conditions.
The conditions of application are slightly less restrictive for category 1 patients and more restrictive for category 3 patients. Importantly, though, all include close involvement with the person’s doctor or doctors, and applicants will need to have tried or considered other medical treatments first.
The legislation also allows an applicant, or a nominated carer, to grow cannabis for the person’s medical use. There are also strict conditions on this process, including how much may be grown, which limit the opportunity for abuse.
The summary of the system presented in this bill is that it allows people with genuine medical conditions to use cannabis for treatment, or to grow cannabis for that purpose, without fear of legal repercussions. It also ensures that medical professionals and the government, via the Chief Health Officer, are involved in this process.
In this way, the proposed scheme is quite minimalist. It does not establish a more sophisticated regime of supply, for example. Some countries, such as the Netherlands, highly regulate the cultivation and supply of cannabis for medical use to ensure pharmaceutical quality and accessibility to the treatment. States in the USA provide access to medical cannabis through shopfront dispensaries which sell the product. These models have the advantage of allowing easier access to cannabis for those who need it and, in the Netherlands model, of guaranteeing a consistent product.
I am certainly open to the prospect of using this type of model here. If the Chief Minister and other members want to talk through how we could make that work, I am eager to do so. I agree it is beneficial to guarantee easy access to consistent product for people who need it.
Of course there are difficulties in establishing such a system, particularly with moving to such a model quickly. Other jurisdictions in Australia, including at the federal level, have not yet accepted the arguments for providing regulated access to medicinal cannabis. I would be concerned that it could take a long time to set up a working model of government-endorsed supply, particularly given the need for federal government cooperation, issues to sort through with therapeutic goods legislation and other potential barriers. It is not sufficient to wait for the federal government to move, or for other states to move, or to wait for some ideal alignment of the planets that never occurs. In the meantime, there are people who need access to this treatment right now.
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