TERMINALLY ill patients are dying without dignity while the nation’s peak doctors’ group stalls on medical marijuana reform, a respected Canberra physician has claimed.
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David Caldicott, a clinical senior lecturer in emergency medicine at Australian National University and consultant physician at Calvary Hospital, said the Australian Medical Association’s (AMA) resistance to cannabis medicine was “hypocritical” and out of step with modern medical practice.
He also questioned whether the AMA’s demand for a repeat of clinical trials which had already been conducted overseas was a delaying tactic influenced by the pharmaceutical lobby.
Despite Prime Minister Tony Abbott and thousands of medical marijuana campaigners supporting the decriminalisation of marijuana for the dying without further trials, the NSW government is forging ahead with a new round of testing, sparking fears a policy could be months or years away.
“They’re addressing something that’s already been addressed and by the time the government gets around to doing another trial, people will have been subjected to unnecessary pain,” Dr Caldicott said.
“People with terminal illness don’t want to hear about another trial. This is about compassion and that’s what medicine is supposed to be all about.”
He also criticised the AMA’s opposition to the use of natural cannabis as medicine ahead of a synthetic version.
Synthetic cannabis would allow pharmaceutical companies to patent a drug and charge users hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to access it, where growing natural marijuana costs the equivalent of growing a tomato plant.
“The question we need to ask is where is this opposition coming from?” Dr Caldicott said.
“There is a growing suspicion that it’s being driven by fears it could undermine the profits generated by big pharmaceutical companies.”
Dr Caldicott is part of a group called No Free Lunches, made up of doctors who refuse to take inducements from pharmaceutical companies.
He is urging the NSW government to conduct trials on patients already using crude cannabis, rather than “start from scratch”.
But AMA NSW president Dr Saxon Smith strongly denied the group was beholden to the pharmaceutical lobby, saying it was focused on putting patient safety first.