Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital would likely host Queensland’s first medicinal cannabis trial, Health Minister Cameron Dick has announced in a letter tabled in state Parliament.
The letter, in response to a petitioner calling for Queensland to allow the use of medicinal cannabis, also revealed Queensland chief health officer Jeannette Young attended the first meeting of a steering committee for the clinical trial last Thursday.
“Queensland will be partnering on an interstate clinical trial of a cannabis derived product to treat children with severe drug-resistant epilepsy,” Mr Dick says in the letter.
“…The Lady Cilento Children’s Hospital is the likely Queensland trial site with the trial expected to commence in 2016.
“The trial presents an opportunity to demonstrate that medicinal cannabis can be a safe and effective addition to existing treatments.
“This would be an important step in promoting further use of medicinal cannabis in Queensland.”
That toddler would not have been administered cannabis under the proposed trial. Comment has been sought from that father.
Queensland Council of Civil Liberties president Michael Cope said while he welcomed the move, Queensland could have gone “a lot further a lot quicker” than it had.
Mr Cope said Queensland should follow the lead of Victoria’s Andrews government, which allowed for treatment for a range of conditions.
“A lot of this stuff about studies, trials and things are, in our view, unnecessary because they’ve all been done elsewhere,” he said.
“The Victorians have proposed a much broader range of uses and situations in which it can be used and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be doing what the Victorians are doing.
“…There are hundreds of studies into the medicinal use of cannabis that have been conducted in the United States, where they’ve been doing this for a long period of time in some states, so we don’t see the need for independent trials.”
Mother Lanai Carter said her son had been successfully treated for a brain tumour with medical cannabis in the US, but was denied access to the same treatment in Queensland.
“The right for my son or any patient to be treated with medical cannabis should be as equally important as any patient’s right to be treated with any life-saving drug,” she said.