2014-08-08
Senator Richard Di Natale
Earlier this month, Sexual Offences and Child Abuse police, brandishing a search warrant, conducted a raid on a suburban home in Victoria.
What made this unique and distressing are the circumstances: the authorities were there to seize medicinal cannabis. Although the parents of a gravely ill child were released, they may face charges including possessing a drug of dependence and introducing a drug of dependence into the body of another.
The basis for the raid was that a very courageous mother had gone public about her reliance on medicinal cannabis as a last-line treatment for her son. Her three-year-old boy suffers severe brain damage, cerebral abscesses, hydrocephalus, epilepsy and cerebral palsy. Following the failure of first-line medical treatments, the mother had turned to medicinal cannabis oil to treat her son and to minimise the frequency of his seizures.
Earlier this year, members of the federal Parliament, from all the major parties, attended a meeting to hear Lucy Haslam. Lucy is a retired nurse from Tamworth who described her experience looking after Daniel, her 24-year-old son, who was found to have terminal bowel cancer four years ago. Daniel developed severe nausea and vomiting after chemotherapy.
None of the conventional medicines relieved his distressing symptoms. But cannabis did.
There is strong international evidence that supports the use of medicinal cannabis as an effective means of relieving nausea, pain and weight loss in terminal cancers and other conditions. A number of major reviews have been carried out and all have found medicinal cannabis is effective and safe and side effects are few and acceptable.
Most parents, and many medical practitioners, would want to be able to use medicinal cannabis as a medicine if a child's condition and circumstances warranted it.
Already about 20 countries, and more than 20 states in the US, allow cannabis to be used as a medicine. But in Australia it is against the law even to investigate whether medicinal cannabis might help. Cannabis is a prohibited plant in all Australian jurisdictions. Possessing, cultivating or trafficking it is a criminal offence.
Yet, while it is prohibited, there are provisions under the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods, the Customs regime and the therapeutic goods regimes that allow for limited exceptions, such as accessing cannabis for the purpose of medical research.
As co-convener of the Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy and Law Reform, my colleagues and I are privy to the increasing evidence that supports the use of medicinal cannabis in terminal cancer cases and other conditions. The public, too, overwhelmingly supports its use.
We shouldn't confuse the use of medicinal cannabis with the wider debate about drug use. The opium poppy, for example, is the source of another illicit drug, heroin; yet is also the source of opiates used in healthcare, such as codeine, morphine, oxycodone and about 25 other opioids used for the relief of chronic pain and suffering.
What we need here is a local evidence base built by examining the effects of approved cannabis pharmacotherapies on people suffering from conditions in which cannabis has been shown to be effective and for whom existing medication has not worked.
Clinical trials of pharmaceutical cannabis are likely to confirm the international evidence and provide reassurance for policy makers to make compassionate and considered laws that help people.
Politicians don't decide whether or not you can use penicillin or insulin. We hand over decisions like that to experts in these fields.
We politicians should also hand over the decisions about medicinal use of cannabis to the experts in regulating medicines.
Rather than criminalising a mother for showing compassion toward her sick child, we should be guided by evidence from experts so that we minimise people's suffering, rather than intensify it.
Dr Richard Di Natale is the Greens health spokesman and a former GP. He is also a co-convener of the Parliamentary Group for Drug Policy and Law Reform. This article originally appeared in the Herald Sun.
Photo by Flickr user simic and licensed under Creative Commons.