The Government’s Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill has passed first reading without dissent. It is not the bill Helen Kelly campaigned for, but is better than nothing.

Jonathan Coleman points out how it is another fairly hollow bill:

I think, actually, to a certain extent there’s exploitation around the confusion about what medicinal marijuana actually is. If you go out and talk to somebody in the street, they would naturally expect that when David Clark was going around the country saying he would deliver medicinal marijuana, that would mean that people who were terminally ill would be able to smoke loose-leaf marijuana to alleviate their pain and symptoms. Of course, that is not what this bill is doing at all. …

It’ll be really interesting to understand how that is any different to what the last Government did under the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act 2016 Commencement Order 2017, passed in about June 2017, where cannabidiol was no longer a controlled drug. All this is, from what I can see in the legislation, is just a tidy up of the legislation to reflect the regulations and existing practice. So, when you take that away, what you’re looking at is a pretty hollowed-out bill. …

But David Clark has said, and this is pretty much from his press release actually, “We wanted to make sure that medicinal cannabis is more accessible to people with terminal illness or chronic conditions and the piece of legislation [here] will make progress.” Well, I can tell you, it absolutely doesn’t, because when you look at people who are using medicinal cannabis for a terminal illness, this is not going to result in one more person accessing medicinal cannabis. The other thing is he’s got a half-baked scheme here. He’s legalising possession, but where are these people—the middle-class, elderly, terminally ill patients of Northcote—meant to get their cannabis from? So it’s a half-baked scheme, which doesn’t go far enough.

Although this is a poorly designed, politically-driven bill, on balance we have to be mindful of the needs of those terminally ill people. So, in the end, compassion has to win out over a very poorly designed piece of legislation. National will be supporting this bill but we’re expecting to see some big changes, some big improvements, and we will have some very big questions when this comes to the select committee.