A SURPRISE Senate vote that opens the door to easier importation of medicinal cannabis could have serious and unintended consequences, a senior University of Newcastle pharmacologist has warned in the Medical Journal of Australia.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Chair of clinical pharmacology Professor Jennifer Martin said the decision could restrict research into medicinal cannabis if it is readily available and indiscriminately used to treat conditions.
The comment was based on contact with researchers in Colorado, where medicinal cannabis is simple to obtain.
“I was talking to the head of the Colorado program just a few months ago. They desperately want to do the research, but no one wants to because they’ve already got the product. There’s a sense that people are just using cannabis to treat a whole lot of things,” Professor Martin said in the MJA article published on Monday.
Professor Martin also warned that treating terminally ill patients with medicinal cannabis before scientific trials to confirm effective therapy and dosages was a risk because they were already “our most vulnerable group”.
“If you’re going to start with anyone, it should probably be a younger, more robust group,” she said.
Professor Martin is involved in cannabis trials including an on-going trial measuring whether medicinal cannabis helps terminally ill patients.
“We’re learning things about dosage and the relationship between dose and symptoms such as development of mental health symptoms. I think it’s worth waiting until we get that data, so we can have an idea about which doses seem effective and which ones may be toxic,” she said.
She was concerned that if clinical data is not available to support medicinal cannabis treatments, the drugs would probably not be listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and patients would be forced to pay.
The Senate vote means doctors don’t need Therapeutic Goods Administration approval to supply medicinal cannabis to terminally ill patients. Some doctors’ groups objected to the move.