LIFT RESTRICTIONS ON MEDICAL MARIJUANA

IN September 2016 I attended a Victorian Law Reform Commission community consultation regarding medicinal marijuana, presented by Ian Freckelton QC.

In his opening remarks, Mr Freckelton mentioned some thousands of studies into the substance, often referring to the need for the Victorian Government to do further research into the “efficacy” of medicinal marijuana.

When question time came I was fortunate to get the first question in, and told Mr Freckelton that we could “cut to the chase” quite quickly.

I then asked him what, from these thousands of studies, detrimental effects of medicinal marijuana use were observed.

Unable to answer my question, Mr Freckelton quickly moved on.

I took this inability to answer the question as: none — no detrimental effects.

If there are no adverse consequences from using this substance, then there is no need for any legislation except to corner the market on the ability to use medicinal marijuana, simply to ensure the government’s own commercial benefit.

Medicinal marijuana should be freely available to all, not on some idiotic restricted list and to be doled out by doctors who might rather prescribe you some pill that does not have the same “efficacy” as medicinal marijuana oil. Gary Oraniuk, Geelong West