Page 4561 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 6 December 1994
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our society are still on those drugs six months after they start to take them. It is, I am told, the usual good medical practice that those drugs be prescribed for relatively short periods. It is the case that there are many people in our community, principally women, who have grave addictive problems because of prescribed drugs. So, anybody who is asking me to trust implicitly every doctor to do the right thing with every drug is asking too much of me.
I have also heard Brendan Nelson of the AMA saying in public that there are doctors of whom the AMA is not proud.
Mr Moore: Because they are not members of the AMA; that is why.
MS FOLLETT: I do not particularly care whether those doctors Dr Nelson is not proud of are members of the AMA or not. There is an acknowledgment at the highest level that doctors cannot be trusted implicitly in all circumstances. We know that there are some doctors who do not do the right thing.
As I have said, the arrangements for the proper conduct of a clinical trial are clearly set out. I heard Mr Connolly say last week that if other members of the Assembly wished to progress the matter of a clinical trial of cannabis he would assist them, and I suspect that that is the correct way to go. I realise that, like other members, I probably am not alone in having read a letter in the newspaper from a woman whose mother was suffering from terminal cancer and had received considerable relief from the use of cannabis. Having read that woman's very sad letter, the questions which arose in my mind were many. In the first place, this woman had to go through an illegal process to obtain the drug. That seems to me to be quite inequitable and to lack social justice, but it is exactly what you would have had to do under clause 5. It is exactly the procedure you would have had to use under clause 5 - go through an illegal process to obtain the drug or grow your own.
There was a second problem raised in that lady's letter for which I had a great deal of sympathy. She did not know what kind of dosage to give her mother or how to administer it. It seemed to me that she had come to a very good decision on that. What she did was to infuse the cannabis, when she eventually was able to obtain it, in some warm milk and she was therefore able to administer a little of it to her mother. It did appear to help, and thank heavens for that. The issues that arise are that neither the patient nor the person administering it to her nor any medical practitioner who might have been in attendance would have had any idea, firstly, of the strength of the drug they were dealing with or, secondly, of the dose that should or would have been given to the patient.
Mr Moore: How many people have overdosed on cannabis worldwide? None. Nobody has ever overdosed on cannabis.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! You will have your turn, Mr Moore.
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