David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

and big pharmaceutical; I accept that interjection—that say we need to continue to criminalise cannabis in order to drive the profits of the pharmaceutical industries and in order to drive the moral agenda of the ALP and the coalition. And who's paying the cost of that? People who desperately need access to medicine, that's who's paying the cost of that.

So, yes, let's get on and radically reduce the cost of legalised cannabis. Let's come to this position that no matter what's in your wallet, no matter who your mum and your dad are, no matter what property you own, if you go to a doctor and a doctor says you need legalised cannabis then you should be able to get it, afford it and treat your chronic pain, treat your health conditions. That's the way the world should operate in a country like Australia.

Then when we do that, let's also legalise cannabis. Let's get the police, the courts and the criminal justice system out of something like 80,000 Australian's lives a year, who are being prosecuted, criminalised, dragged through the criminal justice system, because they are caught possessing one or two joints. Let's do that. Let's take what is perhaps a $25 billion-a-year market out of the hands of criminals and organised crime and bikie gangs. According to the National Criminal Intelligence Commission and the data they have about the prevalence of cannabis use in the country, that's the size of the annual market for recreational cannabis at the moment: $25 billion a year. Let's take that out of the hands of the wrong people, who use it to corrupt our political system, to corrupt our police and to corrupt our courts. Let's take it out of their hands; let's legalise it; let's put safety controls on it; let's put truth-in-advertising controls on it; let's put advertising controls on it; let's deal with it like we're rational human beings. Then we could also reap some $28 billion in tax revenue in the first decade of doing that. Let's maybe deal with this like grown-ups.

I note Senator Steele-John's comments on how we've finally got the TGA to permit MDMA and psilocybin to be used from 1 July to deal with otherwise untreatable depression and PTSD, and that's a major step forward. But it's almost as though we haven't learnt from the legalise cannabis debate. We're seeing reports today that getting access to MDMA or psilocybin under the system that has been set up by the TGA is going to cost patients something like $25,000 a year because of all the restrictions that apply to those drugs. Because they remain class 1 drugs, patients have to set up all of these additional checks and balances and further reporting protocols every time they seek to get access to a medicine that could save their lives. Again we're going to see that, yes, this medicine is available, but only for those with the wealth to access it.

Think about the veterans with chronic PTSD who don't have that money and who will be going to their psychiatrists with the hope that they can get one of these prescriptions come 1 July. Psychiatrists will write out the prescription and give it to them, and then they'll say: 'By the way, have you got $25,000? Because that's what it's going to cost you,' with them on a veteran's pension, surviving with all their troubles. By legalising this in such a narrow way for medicinal purposes and then putting all of these constraints on it and making it unaffordable, you're offering false promise. So let's get on and legalise medicinal cannabis seriously. Let's make it available to everyone who needs it, regardless of what's in their wallet. Let's try and come together as a chamber and as a parliament and actually legislate for good.