Page 4565 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 6 December 1994
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There is another point about somebody on a clinical trial, and I refer also to that letter to the editor that Ms Follett referred to. That is very important because, under those circumstances, a woman who has chemotherapy and whose nausea is overpowering cannot go to a medical practitioner unless in some way there is already a protocol set up and a clinical trial awaiting her. Instead of being able to become very rapidly involved in a research project, it will now clearly take a significant amount of time.
Dr Peter Rowland, the medical practitioner who looks after more people suffering from AIDS than does any other person in the ACT, has indicated that he would provide certificates as soon as he could for those people who are already using cannabis and are subject to a $100 fine. For those people, we are going to remove the pressure. When we get the clinical trial prepared and the protocol prepared, the research institute sets out its application, the application goes to the Minister and the Minister, I hope, deals with that application as quickly as possible, I think we will still be able to provide cannabis particularly for those people who are suffering from AIDS. I suppose that that process is going to take us two or maybe three months.
In the case of Dr Rowland, it seems to me that we will be able to come up with a reasonable solution in some time; but in the case of people who are going blind now, in the case of people who are undergoing chemotherapy now and who have not responded to normal medication and for whom there was another option, any change to the legislation we put through will be closed off. We will be closing off another option to people who are going blind. We will be closing off another option to people who are undergoing chemotherapy, who have the worry of cancer, who cannot eat and who are nauseated in the extreme. We know that in the vast majority of cases ordinary prescribed medicines will assist those people. That is how it should go, and that is what we would expect that a medical practitioner would do. But in other cases we should have been prepared to stick with the legislation. There is a great irony in this whole process. According to the National Task Force on Cannabis:
In Australia, tincture of cannabis was used in medicine until the 1960s, when it was declared a prohibited drug.
We are talking about 30 years ago, when people were using this drug as a medicine, and prohibition has meant that they cannot.
The principal concept we are dealing with here is: Should we be reconsidering this Bill or should we not? The answer, in my mind, very clearly is that there is no need to reconsider this Bill. The appropriate checks and balances are in place. I would like to conclude by taking a particular point that the Chief Minister raised about trusting doctors. She would not trust doctors with this drug; but we trust doctors with morphine, which is very close to heroin. We trust doctors with speed. We trust doctors with the benzodiazepines and, as the Chief Minister said, sometimes, on some occasions - that was the effect of the report we did on benzodiazepines - they are overprescribed. But what we know from the 6,000 or so research papers on cannabis, many of which have been published in such eminent journals as the New England Journal of Medicine - I repeat, the New England Journal of Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine - - -
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