Cannabis study pinpoints Cairns

DANIEL BATEMAN and the collection and chemical analysis of cannabis-based extracts already being used in order to link cannabinoid content to its perceived therapeutic effects.

In Queensland, patients can be prescribed cannabis with the approval of Queensland Health and the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

However PELICAN research officer Ruth Blackburn said the team had heard from several people that the approvals process was too complex.

“There’s a lot of frustration about how hard it is to access it, and how difficult it is to navigate the system that’s in place at the moment,” she said, adding that the current system did not allow people to consider medicinal cannabis as a first-line treatment for epilepsy.

“The people who might benefit from medicinal cannabis are the people with refractory epilepsy, who don’t respond to any other anti-epilepsy drugs,” she said. “So it’s often people who are at the end of the line in terms of treatment, and people that have tried drugs and none of them have worked.” The PELICAN Study workshop will be held at Stratford Library on Friday, from 9.30am to 11.30am.