Craig Liz; Mallard TrevorDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thanks Mr Assistant Speaker. It's an absolute privilege to be speaking on the first reading of the Misuse of Drugs (Medicinal Cannabis) Amendment Bill which is going to amend the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975.In speaking I would like to acknowledge a wonderful colleague known to many of us and that was Helen Kelly. In the months before she died in 2016 of cancer she shared her journey with many of us in New Zealand. I think in that way she became a very powerful advocate for medicinal cannabis because what she found is that even though she was on strong opiates it was really only with cannabis that she could become pain free.In the last few weeks I've been contacted by quite a large number of people as have many of us. Many of them don't actually have a terminal illness; what they've got is chronic neurological conditions: you know spinal injuries cerebral palsy—either sharing what's happening to them or their families. A lot of them have been sharing the fact that their standard pain relief is not working and the transformational effects of having access to cannabis.I was particularly touched by a gentleman who contacted me yesterday. He was talking about the fact that he'd been prescribed morphine he'd been prescribed tramadol—a whole lot of class A drugs. None of them were working and he was just getting lots and lots of side effects and so he was using cannabis. He was saying that using cannabis relieved his pain for three to five hour blocks at a time. Some of the language he was using: and then just the pain returning the pain that won't stop day or night." What he was also talking about was just that whole stress of having to get his family to go out and access that cannabis for him and the difficulty that was creating. And again talking about them risking their freedom "being taken away for me and my pain". So this is a real issue that we need to do something about.This bill will go a long way towards addressing this issue. The first thing it's going to do is it's going to create that overarching regulatory environment so that we can put in place standards for the production of medicinal cannabis. That means that users will have access to high-quality product.The other thing is that we've got this world-wide shortage of usable cannabis because the problem is it's really hard to do big randomised control trials in overseas countries where cannabis is actually illegal. So we're actually operating in an environment where we've not got the actual evidence base that a lot of other drugs have in terms of a pure agent and its effectiveness and being able to do trials where you withhold it or give it to one group or another.What this bill will do is it will give manufacturers a clear set of standards so they can have confidence that if they invest in their research and development and they meet those standards they can actually have a product that's marketable. In that way it will open up the doors for us to create a domestic manufacturing base so that we can get on and grow but then manufacture standard cannabis products.The other thing it'll do is it'll amend schedule 2 of the Act so that cannabidiol is no longer classified as a controlled drug but just as a prescription medicine. Some of that's already been addressed in the regulations but this then just sorts out the legislative side of it. And while not specifically mentioned in the bill itself within that regulatory environment the plan is to set up an advisory committee and that advisory committee will be doctors nursing staff users and stakeholders really having a look at how we then prescribe in an effective and safe way in terms of how we move forward.But the problem we've got is it'll take a little while to get this set up. I think Australia's doing something similar and it's taken them just over two years to get to a point where they might have some product on the market. And so in the meantime the bill introduces a statutory defence for terminally ill people so that if they are using illicit cannabis they don't have that fear of prosecution for what they're doing in terms of pain relief. I guess the question though that has come a lot up a lot is: does this bill go far enough? Because it confers those protections for those who are terminally ill so likely to pass away in the next year—but my question is—when we get select committee I'd like to have a look at whether we can expand that to those with chronic neurological conditions cerebral palsy and some of those other severe conditions and consider whether there's evidence enough to be able to extend those protections to them.So I think it's a very good bill. It takes it a lot further than we've been to date and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.SPEAKER: Simon O'Connor—a five-minute call."