Access to medicinal cannabis in Australia has always been prohibited. Anybody who needed access to the variety of medicinal properties cannabis has to offer had to access hash or tinctures illegally and ran the risk of prosecution.
In 2015, State governments around Australia started the legislative process of approving cannabis for medicinal uses. In 2017, the Australian Federal Government made some legislative changes making the importation of medical marijuana legal. Previous to this, individual doctors had to import small amounts of marijuana on a case-by-case basis.
There are now approved medical marijuana growers across Australia and specialised Cannabis Access Clinics that focus on prescribing medicinal cannabis.
Getting access to marijuana for medicinal purposes is quite difficult in Australia. Although medicinal cannabis is legal in Australia, it is still not approved by the nations Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA) as a registered good.
You need special approval to take it, and the TGA provides two ways for you to go about getting this:
- Firstly, doctors can apply to become "authorised prescribers" of specific non-listed drugs to patients with particular medical conditions.
- Secondly, doctors can apply for medicinal marijuana on behalf of their patients through the "Special Access Scheme".
In both cases, doctors need to be able to show that the drug would be of benefit for a particular patient with a particular disease, and the application processes are stringent.
As well, the use of marijuana for medical purposes still needs to be legal in your state or territory.
Not all doctors can prescribe medicinal marijuana to patients so it has been selectively restricted by governments across the country. In the two years since medicinal marijuana has been legal, only 1059 patients have been approved to access medical cannabis.
I am not sure whether this slow approach to access for medical purposes is the way to go or not, but it is a step in the right direction, particularly for those who need access for medical purposes. Most other jurisdictions around the world have focussed on getting the medicinal cannabis legislation right before they legalised recreational marijuana. Hopefully this is the path that Australia is taking as a large proportion of the Australian population believe that marijuana should be legalised.
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