The Medical marijuana

Marijuana seeds, Cannabis seeds, medicine?

Legalised cannabis will be prescribed to people suffering from chronic pain or wasting illnesses under a four-year trial to be run by the NSW Health Department.

Political second thoughts?

When the Upper House MP Paul O'Grady rang Premier Bob Carr in January 1995 to tell him he was quitting politics, he also unwittingly set in train the first, tentative steps towards yesterday's major reform.

His immune system depleted by HIV, his weight plummeting to 52 kilograms, Mr O'Grady decided his body couldn't stand the rigours of Parliament any longer. He also explained to the Premier the role cannabis can play for patients living with chronic pain.

how? Why Marijuana?
Only patients registered with the new Office of Medicinal Cannabis would be eligible to take cannabis. The options include:

Allowing them to grow a limited amount of cannabis.

Prescribing cannabis tablets or sprays now being developed, or cannabinoids in capsule form.

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The State Government aims to introduce draft legislation to govern the trial during the current parliamentary sitting, with the trial to begin next year.

It would include hundreds of people with cancer, HIV, severe or chronic pain, MS-related muscle spasticity, spinal cord injury or nausea caused by chemotherapy.

The Government is yet to outline how the cannabis would be distributed to participants.

Options include allowing them to grow a limited number of marijuana plants, but a spokesman for the Special Minister for State, John Della Bosca, said it was more likely cannabis would be prescribed like other medicines.

Announcing the trial in parliament yesterday, the Premier, Bob Carr, said new cannabis derivatives developed by the British company GW Pharmaceuticals, including an inhaler-type spray and a tablet, would be considered.An Office of Medicinal Cannabis will be set up within the Health Department to run the trial and possibly distribute the drugs.Medicinal users with a medical certificate from a doctor with whom "they had an ongoing and genuine medical relationship" would register with the office annually.People would be ineligible if they had been convicted of a drug offence other than minor personal use, were on parole, or under 18, or pregnant.The Government has been considering the trial since the 2000 Drug Summit, when it set up a working group to study the issue.Mr Della Bosca's spokesman said the draft legislation was complicated, with a series of legal hurdles to be overcome. He said laws must be changed to allow cannabis to be grown or for a drug company to register a cannabis derivative.The Opposition Leader, John Brogden, said he would support the proposal if the cultivation and distribution of cannabis and eligibility criteria for inclusion in the trial were tightly controlled.The Greens MP Lee Rhiannon called for a broader trial open to children dying from degenerative diseases.

Mr Carr emphasised that the Government did not support decriminalisation of cannabis for recreational use.

"The case against the decriminalisation of cannabis is stronger than ever," he said.

He said the working group found that law-abiding people had been forced to turn to the black market to ease their pain.

"No decent government can stand by while fellow Australians suffer like that, while decent, ordinary people feel like criminals for simply medicating themselves."

The president of the NSW branch of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Choong-Siew Yong, said it supported the trial.He said there was strong anecdotal evidence that cannabis eased the symptoms of sufferers of the diseases listed and could be more effective than drugs now available.But he said it was important that "non-traditional" methods of delivery were used.

"You have to be able to properly control the dose," he said.

"Also, smoking cannabis is as harmful or more harmful than smoking tobacco. As a doctor I could not support that."

The spokesman for the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre, Paul Dillon, said the working group found anecdotal and research evidence supporting the use of cannabis and its derivatives existed, but a greater number of controlled trials were needed.He said clinics in California offered patients cannabis in its natural form, while other United States trials had investigated using so-called canniboids, which contain a synthetic form of the active chemical in cannabis, THC.English trials had already experimented with THC in tablet form, Mr Dillon said.

How the Premier changed his mind

When the Upper House MP Paul O'Grady rang Premier Bob Carr in January 1995 to tell him he was quitting politics, he also unwittingly set in train the first, tentative steps towards yesterday's major reform.His immune system depleted by HIV, his weight plummeting to 52 kilograms, Mr O'Grady decided his body couldn't stand the rigours of Parliament any longer. He also explained to the Premier the role cannabis can play for patients living with chronic pain.