Page 4265 - Week 13 - Thursday, 19 November 2015
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I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
Today I am tabling the government’s response to report No 6 of 2015, inquiry into the Drugs of Dependence (Cannabis Use for Medical Purposes) Amendment Bill 2014 and related discussion paper, which was released by the Standing Committee on Health, Ageing and Community Services on 13 August this year. The report made seven recommendations in relation to the Drugs of Dependence Amendment Bill and discussion paper. I will outline these and the government’s response in further detail.
The response I table today reinforces the government’s support for the compassionate intent behind the introduction of a medicinal cannabis scheme. However, the practical implementation of a scheme as proposed in the draft bill would be extremely challenging. Prior to any such scheme being implemented, many issues would need to be addressed.
The government fully supports a national approach to this issue and is committed to ensuring that any medicinal cannabis scheme has at its core a reliable, quality controlled supply and regulatory framework. I will explain in further detail some of the work being done in other jurisdictions in this area.
The committee report contains seven recommendations, some of which contain more than one point. The government looks forward to addressing a number of the insightful recommendations contained in that report. The government agrees with the committee’s recommendations that more could be done to promote schemes that enable access to pharmaceutical products such as Sativex, and I will be writing to the commonwealth Minister for Health to request that she consider including Sativex on the pharmaceutical benefits scheme, that the special access scheme process is streamlined where possible and that approved pharmaceutical cannabis products are expanded for additional indications where new evidence reflects this need. I will also be writing to the federal minister, therefore, to request that she consider rescheduling other non-psychoactive non-addictive cannabinoids into a lesser schedule, as has been done for cannabidiol in order to facilitate research and development of medicinal cannabis.
The ACT will also continue to work with state, territory and commonwealth governments in the area of clinical trials and facilitate ACT patient access to the upcoming New South Wales trials where that is appropriate. I would like to note that the government has already been actively engaged with New South Wales in the development of a framework for the New South Wales clinical trials, and we support this initiative. We will also work with our counterparts in other jurisdictions to progress a national medicinal cannabis scheme noting that the government gave in-principle support to the cross-party Regulator of Medicinal Cannabis Bill 2014, a bill which I will talk about further shortly.
I would like to briefly outline to members what is occurring in other jurisdictions of Australia and also work being undertaken nationally. In July this year the New South
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