Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. It's an absolute pleasure to be taking a call on the first reading of this bill. As we've already heard what it tries to do is it will make it legal for people who are suffering from terminal illness or other medical conditions to use cannabis with the support of a registered medical practitioner. The thing is though that unlike the bill that passed its first reading yesterday it's not about getting medical cannabis on prescription. It's actually about allowing people to grow their own or allowing their support person to grow their own on their behalf. For me I'm supporting this bill to first reading so that it can go to select committee for a couple of reasons which I'll go into but beyond that unless there are some significant changes made I'm unlikely to support it further.So why am I supporting it to select committee? I think the first thing is that so many people around the country have been in touch. There's a real sense out there that people want their voices heard and I think select committee will allow us to do that.The other thing is that we saw that the Government's own bill passed its first reading yesterday and will go to select committee. I think that bill will address a lot of the issues that people in the community are raising but what I would like to see is some formal discussion about whether and how much further we can go beyond people that have got a terminal illness. So that's why I'd like that looked at in that select committee process.The problem though is that I also have some real concerns about this bill and that's why unless they're changed I wouldn't support it further. There's two parts to that and I think the first one is really about the expectation of people growing their own cannabis. In medicine there's no other area that I've ever seen where you've got somebody who's terminally ill or in severe pain and we're asking them to grow their own medication and the problem there is that there's a whole lot of inherent challenges within that.Apart from the obvious things like crop security there are some other things that have been raised with me not by people opposing the bill but actually by people who have managed to access some of these products. What they're saying is that the issue for them is not about wanting to grow their own—they don't—but they want access to high-quality product. Some of them have been talking about—you know with cannabis and particularly growing your own it's not one entity. It's not one agent. It's a whole lot of different chemicals with different activant agents. So with the cannabinoid (CBD) you know for pain relief—but then the THC's got psychoactive properties and one of the people that was in touch with me was saying You know I want to purchase it from a registered supplier who knows how to separate out the CBD from the THC." They want to be able to know what they're getting is what they need.The other thing is that a lot of people don't want to smoke cannabis; they actually want to use the oils and balms. So for them being able to actually process that and get it done by a proper manufacturer—that's actually what they're needing not being able to just relieve it with smoking and some of the issues are inherent in that.The other thing I think is about a steady year-round supply because you know—I was listening to some of the stories of frequent users talking about what happens when there's a shortage of cannabis. The challenges that this particular person was sharing about having to smoke mouldy cannabis when the supplier was down to their last bits. Also if you run out completely what are the alternatives? So there are a real lot of issues around quality of supply.The other thing I've got concerns about is the broad definition of what's a qualifying condition because under the current bill as proposed for anything where a medical practitioner feels somebody would benefit from cannabis it would be able to be prescribed. We're actually acting in a bit of an evidence vacuum here because we haven't got a lot of randomised controlled trials like other drugs about what this could be effective for and what it's not good for. We've got a sense it's good for cancer and chronic pain but here the extension would be to people with maybe immune disorders and with other nervous system conditions where we don't have an evidence base to back us up and we've also got known adverse effects. Particularly for me the one is young people and psychosis where there have been in susceptible individuals some queries about whether you can bring on psychosis. It's not a completely safe product so we've got to be quite careful.For me I think we need to have that debate. We need to have people to be able to put forward their views and we need to think about the broader extension. But I think a lot of those other issues need to be sorted out at select committee so that we've got a safe high-quality product and we know who's going to get the benefit from it but we've got to step back from causing further harm. So for me personally I commend the first reading and I commend this bill to the House. Thank you."