That has drawn a response from Blackmores, one of several companies that tendered rival bids for the contract.

Blackmores chief executive Christine Holgate says medicinal cannabis should be thought of as just another herb that is beneficial to people, although it is clearly a potent one.

"Really it's just potent herbal medicine," she said on Wednesday.

Nathan Cheong, managing director of BioCeuticals, a Blackmores subsidiary, said that it had offered "medicinal-grade drugs" for the trial to be run by NSW and the Westmead Children's Hospital.

Blackmores defends product

He told The Australian Financial Review that BioCeuticals offered a standardised dose that removed the psychoactive compound THC but preserved the cannabinoids that help prevent seizures associated with epilepsy.

"The medicinal-grade extract we proposed for the trial has been shown through epidemiological evidence to be efficacious," Mr Cheong said through a spokesman.

NSW has led other states in announcing $9 million of clinical cannabis trials for the treatment of childhood epilepsy and pain relief for the terminally ill and cancer patients.

But the decision to hand the epilepsy contract to GW Pharmaceuticals has added to concerns among supporters of easy access to medicinal cannabis that NSW is favouring the high-cost pharmaceutical model.


GW's only fully approved drug, Sativex, for the treatment of tremors in multiple sclerosis, costs about $1500 a month. Blackmores' cannabis product is not patented.

Andreas Gedeon, managing director, of ASX-listed MMJ Phytotech, who has supplied medicinal cannabis in Canada and Europe, questions why NSW is paying a $1.1 billion company with a huge research budget to run extra trials in Australia for a drug that was already being trialled in the United States at the company's expense.

'Street' v patent

He said if the trials were successful GW would have the exclusive rights to the drugs and NSW patients would have to pay high prices.

He said companies like Phytotech could supply almost identical cannabis-based compounds delivered as pills in compliance with good manufacturing practice but at a fraction of the cost to GW's products.

"It's a very bad sign that NSW have chosen GW for these trials. GW's model is about creating restricted patents rather than accessible medicine."

Yet the argument in favour of the patented pharmaceutical model is that the highest standards should be applied, especially for children.

A spokesman for the NSW Ministry of Health said GW Pharmaceuticals was chosen for the paediatric clinical trials because it had a significant pre-clinical program of research, as well as having a product well advanced in the research pathway towards registration overseas.

But the spokesman said the NSW government remained open to working with any group willing to pursue product development that meets ethical guidelines.