Woodhouse MichaelClause 3 Principal ActHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Chair. We start to get into something of the substance of this bill because the principal Act that we are amending is the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 and that Act is a very important piece of legislation. Now there are differing views not only within this House but around the country about the degree to which the substances that are outlawed by the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975 are indeed harmful.There are further discussions and beliefs around the degree to which this Parliament should actually legislate to make something that is a personal choice something that is ingested by the individual unlawful under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975. Indeed the Health Committee heard quite a bit from submitters that—it may have been arguably outside the scope of the purpose of this bill but it certainly wasn't outside the goal of amending the Misuse of Drugs Act to have that conversation which was that perhaps we should have gone further to amend the Misuse of Drugs Act on the basis that—well two things: firstly it is an individual's choice whether they want to ingest illegal substances. Secondly there are benefits to doing so for people who are outside of the scope of the purpose of this bill and therefore the Misuse of Drugs Act should be amended even further than the Government intended to do. In my second reading speech I referred to some research about the efficacy or lack of it in respect of the use of cannabis substances in people with chronic non-cancer pain or non-terminal pain. Now I made a bit of a mistake there because I referred to it as a longitudinal study of 1700 people. I've gone back and checked. This was an article published in The Lancet of July this year entitled Effective cannabis use in people with chronic non-cancer pain". I speak to that in terms of the degree to which we are amending the Misuse of Drugs Act because we heard a lot of submissions that we should go further that we should actually expand this out further than the definition that is contained in clause 4.I was particularly interested to note the findings of that Lancet study which is from Australia—the study of 1514 participants who completed a baseline interview about their use of illicit substances in the belief that it would be better for them for their chronic conditions. Actually this study a very carefully constructed scientific study found that after four years people—compared with people of no cannabis use—actually were doing worse not better. They had greater pain severity scores than those who hadn't used cannabis. They had higher reliance on prescription opioids. They had lower pain self-efficacy scores. They had greater generalised anxiety disorders. And there was no evidence of a temporal relationship between cannabis use and pain severity or pain interference and no evidence that their cannabis use reduced prescribed opioid use—I mentioned that.Now I say that in this context because we are amending the Misuse of Drugs Act but we're doing so for a specific purpose and that is to provide an exemption from prosecution for people who are terminally ill. I frankly don't believe they are better off for that. But if they are terminally ill where's the harm? For those who came to us and said the principal Act should be further amended to include chronic conditions that weren't terminal this is a party that acts on the evidence and the very clear evidence including from the most recent study published in The Lancet was that there was no benefit no efficacy for use of that.Louisa Wall: That's not what we heard though.Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE: That's not what we heard. The chairman of the select committee is quite right. We heard very different things. Indeed Chlöe Swarbrick in a recent media commentary uses as evidence people's attitudes. People's attitudes are not evidence. The actual lived experience of those who ingest cannabis and find themselves no better off but worse off is evidence. So in the scope of this bill I think we need to be very careful not to conflate the two conversations this country is having; that is the decriminalisation of marijuana and the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes."