Coleman JonathanHon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (National—Northcote): It's a great pleasure to be able to take a call on what is a bill of high public interest throughout the country. I commend the Minister on bringing this bill to the House. It was rather politically driven on his part in the sense that the Labour Party had made this commitment to introduce medicinal cannabis legislation in their first 100 days and he's just got it under the bar. But I was very intrigued by his speech and I will come back to that shortly.As an electorate MP in the Northcote electorate I've had extensive contact with people from a wide range of backgrounds with a wide range of views on medicinal cannabis but there is no doubt that this is becoming much more of a mainstream issue and that people have an interest in being able to access these products when they are experiencing sadly a terminal illness. There's also of course people who are wanting to access it for a wider range of medical complaints as well. It's also been an issue that's had a great deal of public exposure through the sad illnesses of Helen Kelly and Paul Holmes and Martin Crowe—three very public figures who all said in their latter days that they had accessed medicinal cannabis. So there's no question that this is an issue that the Parliament has to deal with and that it's of great import to tens of thousands of people across the country. The Minister canvassed what is in the bill but I think it would be true to say that he added in a lot there that he claims is in the bill that there's actually virtually no mention of.So just to recap this bill is a long way from perfect. Yes it introduces that statutory defence for someone who is in the last 12 months of life with a terminal illness so that they have a legal defence for the possession of cannabis or any cannabis product or the utensils with which to use that product. It also puts in place a regulation-making power for a potential future scheme but it's absolutely silent on the scheme. And I was intrigued to hear the Minister—he didn't take his full 10 minutes. He only managed to go for just over eight minutes which is a bit of a surprise considering that this is in his top two priorities in health; the only priorities in the 100-day plan and this was one of them. But he made out that this bill talks about setting up a scheme for access to medicinal cannabis and I'd invite people at home to go around and have a look at the bill. It's available on the Ministry of Health website. It does not talk about the setting up of a scheme. It is completely silent on that. My concern about this is it's not clear whether the Minister really knows what that scheme will look like.I can say that he must have his officials tearing their hair out because he was out there around New Zealand campaigning big on medicinal cannabis. He said to people that the Labour Government would increase access to medicinal marijuana for the terminally ill and those with chronic pain and chronic conditions. Of course that created a huge wave of expectation and there will be many people who when they read this bill will be bitterly disappointed. As Bill English has said this is a Government long on intentions but actually very poor in the delivery. That's what we're seeing in this bill. It's a hollowed-out weak bill that goes nowhere close to delivering on what Labour had promised.I think actually to a certain extent there's exploitation around the confusion about what medicinal marijuana actually is. If you go out and talk to someone in the street they would naturally expect that when David Clark was going around the country saying he would deliver medicinal marijuana that that would mean that people who were terminally ill would be able to smoke loose-leaf marijuana to alleviate their pain and symptoms. Of course that is not what this bill is doing at all.Medical marijuana encompasses a huge range of products right from those that have undergone clinical testing—which is how we treat any new medicine introduced into New Zealand—through to what we call non-pharmacological grade which are medical marijuana products that haven't met any accepted standards here or overseas. And then there's this very confusing term cannabidiol. Marijuana has two components. There's the THC which is the psychoactive component and then there's the non-psychoactive component which is cannabidiol. There's a change there in this bill. Of the three changes we've talked about two of them. There's the regulation-making power. There's the effective decriminalisation for possession of marijuana although it's silent on the quantity for terminal patients who are using it for their own use. But then there's this thing that the Minister has been heralding—how they are changing the classification of cannabidiol.It'll be really interesting to understand how that is any different to what the last Government did under the Misuse of Drugs Amendment Regulations passed in about June 2017 where cannabidiol was no longer a controlled drug. All this is from what I can see in the legislation is just a tidy-up of the legislation to reflect the regulations and existing practice. So when you take that away what you're looking at is a pretty hollowed-out bill.The last Government had already taken some action on medicinal marijuana. Peter Dunne did a very good job as the Minister then and I want to acknowledge his contribution. In December 2016 he removed some of the bureaucratic restrictions around access to marijuana and Sativex one of two products available in New Zealand no longer needed ministry approval for sign-off. He then in February 2017 signed off non - pharmaceutical grade medical cannabis. That delegation was moved from the Minister to the Ministry of Health.I want to acknowledge at this point the family of Alex Renton who have campaigned over a long period for medicinal cannabis. That was a very sad case where young Alex had a condition status epilepticus and his mother and supporters petitioned for him to have access to Elixinol oil in the hope that that might alleviate some of his symptoms. Sadly though he passed away.But David Clark has said and this is pretty much from his press release actually We wanted to make sure that medicinal cannabis is more accessible to people with terminal illness or chronic conditions and the piece of legislation [here] will make progress." Well I can tell you it absolutely doesn't because when you look at people who are using medicinal cannabis for a terminal illness this is not going to result in one more person accessing medicinal cannabis. The other thing is he's got a half-baked scheme here. He's legalising possession but where are these people—the middle-class elderly terminally ill patients of Northcote—meant to get their cannabis from? So it's a half-baked scheme which doesn't go far enough.It's very clear it's the result of that political pressure to get this over the line within 100 days. If you don't believe me have a look at the regulatory impact statement (RIS) because that's very clear about what this bill does and doesn't do. It actually says there's been massive time pressure here. It actually says the legislation has had to be rushed to get it under the bar for 100 days. It says there will be a paper in March 2018 that will lay out the description of this medicinal cannabis scheme which the Minister was talking about as if it's actually in the legislation. It's not. The scheme has not been designed. All this gives is a regulation-making power. So you can see this is a heck of a long way from perfect and there are some major weaknesses in the bill.The RIS also goes on to look at it. It says that when you score this bill against its intentions in terms of increasing equity to medicinal cannabis in terms of quality and safety and on compassionate grounds—and this is exactly what it says in terms of impact analysis—well this is the same as doing nothing in terms of increasing equity to medicinal cannabis; it's the same as doing nothing in terms of improving quality and safety but on compassion it is much better than nothing.Although this is a poorly designed politically driven bill on balance we have to be mindful of the needs of those terminally ill people. So in the end compassion has to win out over a very poorly designed piece of legislation. National will be supporting this bill but we're expecting to see some big changes some big improvements and we will have some very big questions when this comes to the select committee. Thank you."