Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to make some comments and add my support to the excellent contributions from Senator Steele-John and Senator Shoebridge. I'd also like to start by acknowledging the work of many advocates over many years to get medicinal cannabis to where it is today—particularly Senator Richard Di Natale, who was a drugs and alcohol doctor before he went into politics. He's continuing his work in that area, post politics. I remember him speaking about it relentlessly in this chamber and having meetings for all parliamentarians in the committee rooms with people who were suffering terrible illnesses and calling for the legalisation of medicinal cannabis. I would like to acknowledge the LNP for taking their first steps in this regard, especially in relation to the limited access to medicinal cannabis we have today.

I remember, as the agriculture spokesperson for the Greens at the time, the irony of seeing former minister Hunt removing restrictions for the growing of medicinal cannabis in Australia solely for the export market. We were able to grow cannabis to create CBD products and THC products, and to sell into this massively burgeoning export market. But we weren't able to sell those Australian-grown products to Australian patients, which was obviously a ludicrous position to be in. I remember his media release specifically saying that this is one of the biggest growth markets in the world in terms of high-value agricultural products. At a very similar time we were seeing Canada and other countries remove restrictions and legalise cannabis, and it seemed so ironic that Australian patients couldn't access it at all, legally. But that has changed. There is limited access.

For those Australians who don't understand how it works—it's still remarkable how many don't know that you can access cannabis legally—you need to go to your GP, and your GP needs to then, essentially, recommend you to a specialist group of doctors, who often do their consults online. An example company would be Tetra Health. A number of specialist doctors around the country have done what's required by the TGA to be able to prescribe cannabis, but many GPs just don't know about it. I've had discussions with a lot of really good GPs, a couple of whom are close friends, and they say: 'Peter, we don't have time. We are under the pump every day, with waiting lists of up to six weeks just for common colds, COVID and a whole range of things. We don't have time to go and do the course to be able to prescribe this.'

If you get a GP that is even onside, they will recommend you to a series of specialists. The GP has to provide a very specific medical reason as to why you should have access to medicinal cannabis. If you get that referral, you then go through a process where you're assessed, usually by a nurse, and you have to fill in a number of forms. Then that assessment gets passed on to a doctor who is a specialist in the area. Then what happens is the doctor will work with you over a period of time in an assisted therapy. They'll prescribe cannabis to you based on their consults with you, which can be quite extensive, and they will then have regular catch-ups with you to make sure that the medicine that they're prescribing is working for you. That's the feedback loop.

But it is really expensive. These doctors will charge a one-off fee just to start the process. I think it's at least $300, and that's without even paying for your cannabis. As Senator Shoebridge so eloquently put it, it's not accessible. It's not accessible to ordinary, everyday Australians. Senator Steele-John or Senator Shoebridge—it may have been either one; they're both doing fantastic work in this area—asked the TGA at the last estimates how many Australians are currently legally on medicinal cannabis. Over 300,000 Australians have accessed the scheme, but we know that it's estimated at least 800,000 Australians are using cannabis products. There's a massive gap there of half a million Australians who are using black-market products that aren't regulated, and the sole reason for that is they don't have the money to afford the medicinal cannabis scheme. We've seen good first steps, and I do thank the previous government for the work that they've done on getting it to this stage.

I would also like to throw my support behind the comments made by both my colleagues in relation to MDMA and psilocybin. This has been a long road. I would also very much like to thank Mind Medicine and a number of other advocates for their leadership on this issue. Australians shouldn't be denied the treatments and therapies that they need. The thing about this is that it's very similar to medical cannabis in that, if you're lucky enough to be eligible for this treatment now, it's very specialist and very expensive. There are a number of bottlenecks that we need to get through. I was recently on a conference call with Mind Medicine, with 300 or 400 other Australians who are interested in this trial—many of them doctors, by the way. They did recognise there would be bottlenecks, for example, around who could prescribe these products, how much they would cost and what that would look like. It's very early days, and I would urge the government and the TGA to get through these as quickly as possible, because we know there are people who desperately need this treatment.

What Australians don't understand around MDMA and psilocybin is that the results have been so stunning in trials overseas in showing how quickly this treatment can work. It's also an assisted therapy. You don't get given an MDMA medicine script from your doctor. You go and work with a psychotherapist, usually a highly trained psychiatrist, who, at the moment, under the current TGA rules, which were announced in February, needs to register with the TGA, which is another process in itself, and we're not quite sure what it looks like. These trials have been so stunning in their success that often it takes only two assisted therapy sessions for people like veterans with severe PTSD or for people with end-of-life illnesses who are suffering significant anxiety. Thankfully, many of us are not in that cohort of Australians who have been diagnosed with a terminal illness and are suffering pain, but the mental pain and stress, not just for them but for their families who are dealing with this, can be extraordinary and significant and debilitating. A couple of assisted therapy sessions for people with these illnesses can make a significant difference.

We are not quite sure how it works, but there is a lot of evidence that psilocybin, for example, and MDMA can essentially rewire the synapses in your brain that are failing. This is also for another cohort of people who are classified as terminally suicidal people, people who have got to the point in their life where they are literally going to take their own lives—all existing therapies have failed. These drugs have an incredible ability to rewire your brain. It involves the plasticity of how your brain works. For some people, parts of their brain have literally switched off. They do not work. These drugs can connect those synapses. I have seen videos of it, using medical technology and looking at scans of brains. It literally lights up parts of the brain that have died in many people. Working with a trained psychiatrist, they are able to literally bring people's brains to life.

There has been a lot of stigma around the use of these drugs for many years. The whole war on drugs—crikey, we could talk for many, many hours about what a waste of money, time, energy and human life that has been. I want to make this really clear. If you look at the Greens policy on drugs and you go to our website—I invite all Australians to do that—where we talk about decriminalising and legalising drugs, the very first sentence says, 'We recognise drugs can do harm.' That is why we need to take a harm-minimisation approach to the use of drugs. We also recognise they can do a lot of good, such as in the correct application of things like psilocybin—magic mushrooms—and MDMA, but this whole stigma around the war on drugs has essentially cut off the head of the medical application of these drugs for so many years. It is great that we are at least taking the first baby steps to explore the potential of these drugs. It is a whole new frontier of medical science and a very exciting one. I know my medicine—many of their followers are budding graduates in psychology, psychiatry or medical who want to get into this field because it offers so much promise.

We are talking about people with very severe illnesses for whom nothing else has worked, and that is essentially why the TGA approved this. If you read the announcement on their media release, they said, 'We accept that other therapies have not worked, and by definition, we need to give this a go.' Of course, that raises the problem that, because there haven't been phase 1 to phase 3 trials of some of these drugs in Australia, we do not have the information. We can learn from the trials that are happening overseas, which are very promising, but because of the inertia and inaction in this country for so many years, we do not have that data. These trials will be a live social experiment to provide that data for us. I think this is going to be extremely valuable. The same applies to medicinal cannabis. The 300,000 Australians out there on this medicine and working with doctors who are trained in this area will provide us with valuable information that, I hope, will propel us to the next stage.

The other thing that we very rarely talk about is the potential for our agricultural communities. I am sure there are senators in this room who know producers currently of medicinal cannabis or hemp. Hemp is generally used for industrial applications and productions and has been used for thousands of years, as has cannabis, but hemp can be used for CBD products. Basically, your brain has cannabinoid receptors. I don't know whether senators know that, but it's actually the most common receptor in the human brain. Why do our brains have cannabinoid receptors? Obviously we've evolved that way. We know these drugs can actually light up parts of our brain, and we can use the CBD from hemp. However, the higher-value applications are in the growing of cannabis for either CBD oil, which has no THC in it—you can take it and you're not going to get high, but it has very valuable properties for people with a number of illnesses—or THC products.

These are high-value products for our agricultural communities. We have a number of growers in Tasmania. I think Tasmania is currently the biggest producer of cannabis. Much of it is still exported overseas. Senator Urquhart knows some of the producers in her area in the north-west of Tasmania. I've been down and visited the compound of Tasmanian Botanics, outside Hobart. When I sat down with them they had a number of complaints about how the process works, which I don't have time to go into today. Clearly we're still getting this right, and there are things we can learn from overseas about the legalisation of drugs. Tasmanian Botanics produces products that are now available through the Australian scheme, but the company admits that these products are really expensive and hard to access. And of course if we do legalise these drugs completely they obviously will be able to grow these as well. But we do see overseas that there are a number of growers in northern California who were growing illegally for many years and the government essentially sat down and worked with them to feed them into the legal scheme, and they became regulated. I think it's been a big success.

It's very encouraging that we're having a discussion today about how we can continue to advance this very exciting frontier of medicine that I think's going to open up huge possibilities. I hope also, for human development, that we can start seeing our world differently, that we can start seeing each other differently and that we can start exploring this frontier, but it's got to be done the right way. I think the bigger debate is about legalising cannabis and finally walking away from this terrible war on drugs that has literally achieved nothing. It's available on every street corner. We have people going and buying cannabis and other products in car parks or in dodgy circumstances. We have people who are on highly addictive drugs and have addiction issues, which is a health problem, and they are dying because we're not assisting them in the way we should. These people need our help. They don't need to be put into a criminal system where essentially they're condemned for the rest of their life—not being able to get a loan, not being able to get a job. We're creating a subclass of people in our society. So the Greens are very pleased to be debating this bill today.

Debate adjourned.