Medicinal Cannabis Is Effective in Relieving Pain, According to Patients
Since the Turnbull government legalised the cultivation, production and distribution of medicinal cannabis effective October 2016, the estimated 100,000 Australians who’d already been using the medicine have had a rough time in accessing legal and affordable product. The medicinal cannabis...
Lawyers Call For Drug Law Reform: An Interview With ALA’s Greg Barns
“The war on drugs has failed” is a common catchphrase these days. Ever-increasing numbers within the community are coming to realise that the great edifice of heavily enforced drug prohibition is more destructive on a societal and individual level than...
NSW Greens Deliver Workable and Timely Cannabis Legalisation Bill
NSW Greens MLC Cate Faehrmann has introduced a bill into state parliament that aims to establish a regulated retail cannabis market in NSW - as well as decent provisions for homegrow - at a time when, if world trends are...
AIVL’s Melanie Walker on Coming Drug Decriminalisation and Treatment Access
ACT Labor MLA Michael Pettersson has yet again set his sights on reforming the Canberra community. This time it’s in the form of just introduced legislation that would see the decriminalisation of the personal possession and use of illicit substances...
Future Generations Will Condemn the Drug War: Reform Is Urgent and Inevitable
Virtually all cultures in history have used psychoactive drugs. One of the few objects nomadic Indigenous Australians carried from one camp to the next was so-called “bush tobacco” or “pituri”, containing the psychoactive ingredient nicotine which reduces heat loss when...
Vote to Legalise Cannabis in the WA Election: An Interview With LCWA’s Leo Treasure
The 31st of January this year marked 12 months since the ACT legalised the personal use and possession of cannabis. And to date, the sky is yet to fall in. In fact, by all accounts, nothing has changed except for...
Buprenorphine: Helping Prison Inmates to Stay Away from Illegal Drugs
Last year, New South Wales Corrective Services injected about 900 prison inmates a month with a view to keeping them away from illegal drugs. Injecting inmates with an opioid called Buprenorphine, or ‘Bupe’, is intended to help inmates who have...
Where Has All the Legal Medicinal Cannabis Gone?
A patient who uses medicinal cannabis to treat their ailments recently remarked in a social media forum that at present it’s taking their chemist at least two weeks from payment to fill their prescription for cannabis medicine. “They wonder why...
Drug Decriminalisation for the ACT: An Interview With Labor MLA Michael Pettersson
Led by the Uniting Church Synod of NSW/ACT, Fair Treatment has been calling on the jurisdictions of NSW and the ACT to decriminalise drug use and personal possession since late 2018. This health-based campaign has the backing of over 60...
A Violation of Civil Liberties: NSWCCL’s Elizabeth Htwe on Criminalising Drug Use
Since the drug-related deaths of two young Australians at the Sydney Defqon.1 festival in September 2018, the NSW Liberal Nationals government has understood that this state’s current approach to illicit substances isn’t working. Indeed, by the end of that music...
