Documentaries
In New Zealand, our medical marijuana patient zero was Council of Trade Unions president Helen Kelly, who publicly admitted using cannabis for pain relief and called for a referendum on legalisation.
In Australia, it was 24-yearold Dan Haslam from the conservative city of Tamworth, who began using cannabis during chemotherapy and who launched a campaign to decriminalise the drug for terminally ill patients.
Haslam features in A Life of Its Own (Choice TV, Sunday, 8.30pm), a documentary in which journalist Helen Kapalos explores the issues
surrounding medical marijuana. As Haslam’s campaign spread across Australia, it took on, says Kapalos, “a life of its own”.
It may be worth noting that medical cannabis trials are now being conducted in NSW, thanks to Haslam, but at the time of the documentary, Kapalos found many parents who had turned to the black market to treat their children for epileptic seizures.
That is, essentially, the issue. Because of marijuana’s illegal status, there has been a lack of research into its medicinal uses – except, as Kapalos discovers, in Israel, where Professor Raphael Mechoulam has been researching cannabis for 50 years. The medically active compound in cannabis, CBD (as opposed to the compound that gets you high, THC), “acts against a huge number of diseases,” he says.