Health minister Jillian Skinner: concerned about health impacts. Credit:Chris Lane TELL US ABOUT YOUR DRUG USE: TAKE THE GLOBAL DRUG SURVEY Cancer Council NSW director of health strategies Kathy Chapman said medical cannabis should not be available widely but in some cases people who were dying had tried everything else available. "Pain relief has improved over the past 10 years or so... but there are still times when people spend their last period of time in a lot of pain, and if you can alleviate that then you have an important responsibility as a society," she said. Cancer Voices NSW spokeswoman Sally Crossing said the government's response to the issue read like it had its “head in the sand”.

“It's a mixture of maintaining old pre-formed views and promoting government agencies which have no mandate to look into this issue, evaluate the research and experience in other jurisdictions, or indeed commission the research they feel has not been done,” she said. The government has given in to "cannabis hysteria" say the Greens. Credit:Reuters However, she was more concerned with the government's lack of commitment to making sure new pharmaceutical treatments based on cannabis were available than the decision on legal exemptions. The cross-party parliamentary committee found that some people with terminal conditions experienced symptoms that could not be controlled with existing medications, but that the only cannabis-based product legally available was only approved for use in people with Multiple Sclerosis. It found it could take years for that to be expanded to other patients, and unless it was subsided financially would be out of reach for many anyway.

In the meantime patients were using cannabis illegally, sometimes without the knowledge of their doctor. Long-term health impacts are irrelevant to those who have only a few months or years to live. “The Committee agrees with the argument... that a compassionate approach that recognises individual needs and choices is highly desirable and morally justified,” it said in its final report. “We have some sympathy for the argument that patients can be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves, and that it is preferable that they do so under the guidance of their doctor”. It recommended the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act be amended to add a complete defence to the use and possession of cannabis by people with a terminal illness who were authorised to do so. It said the NSW Ministry of Health should establish and administer a register of authorised users. In her response, health minister Jillian Skinner said pain and palliative care specialists did not support prioritising cannabis when there were other safe and effective alternative medications.

“The government does not support the use of unregulated crude cannabis products for medical purposes as the potency and safety of these products cannot be guaranteed,” she said. “The NSW government believes this will not prevent access to appropriate medical treatment for any patient in NSW, given the availability of safe and effective alternative medications”. She said the NSW government's pain management plan, in place until 2016, would increase access to hospital-based pain-management services. But she did accept the committee's recommendation that she write to the federal health minister expressing her support for the expansion of access to pharmaceutical cannabis products by additional patient groups and further trials of cannabis-based medicines. Greens health spokesman John Kaye said the government had given in to “cannabis hysteria”. “The Upper House Committee carefully confined its recommendations to people with terminal illness or end-stage HIV, yet Health Minister Jillian Skinner rejected the findings arguing that cannabis can be a harmful drug with a number of health impacts,” he said. “The Minister is ignoring the reality that the people we targeted are dying. Long-term health impacts are irrelevant to those who have only a few months or years to live.”

Decriminalisation of small amounts of cannabis was also supported by a number of other submissions to the inquiry, including the Australian Federation of AIDS organisations and ACON. Michael Cousins, the director of the Pain Management Research Institute at Royal North Shore Hospital and the University of Sydney and a member of the taskforce that developed the government's pain management plan, told the inquiry there was an "urgent need" for more options for people experiencing pain. "We should be doing something now," he said. "In view of the lack of options we currently have, I think it is very important that we take advantage of this option [cannabis]".