Page 2156 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 August 2014
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We told our kids to stay away from drugs; and we meant it. But when you’re told your son is in the situation ours is, and nothing else works, you have no choice but to try everything …
… the laws as they stand at the present time have turned my family into criminals as we try to manage debilitating cancer symptoms and to try and get rid of this hideous disease.
The facts are simple: He is dying. This helps him. And yet we’re still criminalised.
These are the kinds of stories that make me think that not only is it compassionate to allow access to medicinal cannabis; it is, in fact, cruel to deny access to medicinal cannabis.
It is becoming more and more familiar that we see doctors supporting their patients in their use of cannabis as a medical treatment. The doctor of two-year-old Abbey, a little girl featured recently in the media who has a rare disease that causes constant uncontrollable seizures, was asked about Abbey’s mother using a cannabis tincture to treat the symptoms. The doctor said he supports anything that works for her. It is brave that the doctor even spoke about the issue, and to supply the treatment or provide support for its use he could well be forced to engage in civil disobedience.
The problem is that these are questions about medical treatment, about the health of the sick or dying, but politicians or police are making the decisions instead of medical practitioners. It is time we allowed doctors to make these decisions with their patients.
Members may have seen similar stories of anguish in the media recently, about children suffering from uncontrollable seizures and the vast improvement they have received from treatment with cannabis oil. The families are left with no choice but to break the law in order to help their children. Several of them are organising to move to the US, where medical cannabis is already legal in more than 20 states. In fact, there are many countries across the world that allow access to medicinal cannabis; members will see I have listed a summary of some of these schemes in the discussion paper.
I believe there are several key reasons why the use of medicinal cannabis is not yet permitted in the ACT or in Australia, and I would like to briefly comment on a few of those discussion points.
The first is that the issue of medicinal cannabis is often conflated—sometimes deliberately by opponents—with the issue of recreational cannabis. But these are two separate issues. Recreational use of cannabis should not be compared to medicinal cannabis. Recreational cannabis is used without medical advice or supervision; it is not being used as a treatment; and it is often used over longer periods or by young people.
Medicinal cannabis has been the subject of major national reviews by experts in many countries, including the USA, the UK and Australia. They have determined cannabis
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