Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This will be a day of some considerable celebration by many Australians who are suffering, or whose children are suffering, a variety of medical conditions and who find very real relief in the use of cannabis. We are talking about conditions such as epilepsy, glaucoma, migraine, pain associated with degenerative diseases and spinal injuries. We also know that this is a product that can assist those many tens of thousands of Australians who are going through chemotherapy at any one time as they seek to struggle with the nausea that often is generated by the chemotherapy. So it is important that here we are, beginning to understand that we need to act on this, that we need to put aside some of the past irrationalities that have surrounded the use of cannabis and many other drugs in this community and start coming up with a series of very well thought through, rational policies to allow us to get this mix right—to get our legislative regime on a proper, rational path.

I do note with some interest that it was 90 years ago that the Commonwealth first legislated to ban cannabis in Australia. Subsequently a series of complementary state legislation was introduced, but it was 1926 when the Commonwealth first legislated in this area. Certainly in the 19th century cannabis had been a very commonly used pharmaceutical or medical therapy. It was recognised that it had very positive qualities. At the turn of the 20th century cannabis became very much tied up with big debates about migration, both in America and, to a lesser extent, in Australia. But certainly we had our own version of that and concern over opium, and our attitudes towards opium became very much intermingled with issues associated with migration from Asia. In the United States, which led the charge in the banning of cannabis, it was very much associated with Mexican migration.

So we have finally come back to a point, and it is part of the cycle, where we are beginning to understand that many naturally occurring products are very beneficial and have real medicinal qualities and we are prepared to move beyond some of the almost hysterical reactions to these products and put in place an access regime that will allow people who really can benefit from the use of those drugs to do so.

This is a very cautious piece of legislation, I think. It has been embraced, because the state governments of New South Wales and Victoria have indicated that they want to commence a process of clinical trials for cannabis derived products. Both New South Wales and Victoria will be doing trials into the treatment of children with severe drug-resistant epilepsy. This is a very real issue. In my home state of Western Australia, Suresh Rajan, the chief executive of the epilepsy association, said that he would have up to 100 mothers who use it on their children illegally. He was part of the advocacy group that got us to this position today, where we are going to see a series of trials.

I am very pleased that New South Wales have also indicated that they will not be confining their trials simply to children with drug resistant epilepsy but they will also be doing separate trials, hopefully, on adults with terminal illnesses, focusing on improving quality of life and the symptoms of pain, nausea and vomiting. They will also be looking at a trial for adults with chemotherapy-induced nausea, where standard treatments are ineffective. So there will be considerable movement with these trials that are going to take place in those two states.

In order to allow this to happen, to give the states the capacity to do this, we must amend our national regulatory regime. I am very pleased to say that we have had bipartisan support on this. I acknowledge the parliamentary friends group that has been pushing for this for some years. I also acknowledge all those people with medical conditions and their families who have, with so much vigour and integrity, pursued this issue. I very much look forward to these trials being concluded and us then allowing any of the persons within those classifications to have access to the very therapeutic benefits that I am sure will be upheld as a result of these trials. The anecdotal evidence, the historic evidence, is so strong that I think we can be fairly confident that there will be positive outcomes from these trials.

It is interesting reflecting on some of the history. Some of the historical opposition to the use of cannabis has come from pharmaceutical companies who prefer to ensure that their own manufactured products have exclusivity in the marketplace. I just hope that we are now at a place of sufficient rationality where we can let the science, and not the benefit of these pharmaceutical companies, be the force that drives the policy settings that we have. There is some disappointment amongst some of the activists in this area that the bodies that are going to be able to grow and supply will tend to be commercial entities, but, in order to get this underway, this is perhaps not an unreasonable first step. But, into the future, once we have gone through this trial process, I think we should be very open to ensuring that we review who we are going to be prepared to licence.

The previous speaker, the member for Page, expressed concern that cannabis may get into the hands of organised crime. One of the ironies is that it is our legislative regime that has, to a very large extent, driven the organised crime. If you look at the history of the introduction of prohibition of alcohol in the United States, it led to the wholesale establishment of Mafia and, no doubt, 'Ndrangheta and other organised crime syndicates in the United States. We see much the same thing with the drug trade. It is the very illegality—the insistence that we focus so much on the supply side and not the demand side—that has led to the generation of organised crime.

It is important that, as well as dealing with this issue of the medicinal use of cannabis, in the longer run we be prepared to look at a more rational regime around the more general recreational use of cannabis. At this point, I note that I am veering into my own space and not necessarily determined Labor Party policy. But I was pleased to be part of a Labor government in Western Australia that introduced a measure of decriminalisation of cannabis, because we understood that, the more that you can take this out of the hands of organised crime, the better it is for society. It is a pretty widely used drug within the community. There is an argument that this has become a 'gateway drug'. If there is any truth in it, it is true because we are connecting people to organised crime and to other drugs by requiring this to be a drug that is in fact only marketed through organised crime.

It is interesting that not only are there more than 20 states in the United States that have permitted medical cannabis to be prescribed but there are a number of states now that are moving towards a more general decriminalisation of cannabis, in recognition that we really need to deal with the demand side and that all we have really been doing, to a very considerable extent, is providing a business model for organised crime. I would hope that this is a debate about which we can be a little more rational into the future, and that this small and modest step towards trials of medicinal cannabis will start opening our minds to a more objective assessment of how best we deal with the problem of drug use.

I do not think it is possible to exaggerate the destructiveness of ice, for example, on individual users and the degree to which people from all socioeconomic groups in society—not just people that have family problems, or personal problems, but indeed anyone—can very, very easily find themselves in the grip of ice. I wonder whether or not part of our difficulty in controlling this is because we tend to take the same attitude towards all drugs, all psychotropic substances. This perhaps undermines our credibility with those people who we would seek to educate about those drugs that have very, very significant risks. We often do not send out a nuanced and, dare I say, believable message to many of our young people because we lump all of these substances in together with the label 'bad'.

I certainly have long been part of a drug law reform movement that believes that the focus on harm minimisation must be the way to go and we must be looking as much at the demand side as the supply side and that is deeply concerned about the power of organised crime about the business model that we are making available to organised crime with our current regime of drug laws. Again, I compliment all the people who have been involved in lobbying for this legislation over the years. I really hope many people will find a great deal of relief.

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