In Australia, a continent-country of 24 million people, there are 38,000 physicians licensed to work as general practitioners.<\/p>\n
In Australia, a country where medical marijuana has been legal since 2016 for anyone with a doctor\u2019s note to use it, there is exactly one general practitioner \u2014 out of 38,000 \u2014 who is an \u201cauthorized prescriber for medical cannabis,\u201d\u00a0according to the president of the country\u2019s most prominent organization representing doctors.<\/a><\/p>\n According to Australian authorities, only 1,059 people across the country have been approved for legal medical cannabis access since that time.<\/p>\n This means that even as Australian marijuana firms ramp up exports of the drug, in a bid to become \u201cthe world\u2019s number one exporter of medicinal cannabis,\u201d\u00a0as the country\u2019s health minister said in January<\/a>, many domestic patients who would benefit from that cannabis can\u2019t get any.<\/p>\n This is leaving sick people like the Taylor sisters, who both suffer from\u00a0Crohn\u2019s disease<\/a>, pondering emigration as the only logical alternative to risking arrest and prosecution while using their preferred medicine illegally.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been thinking about me going to America for a while,\u201d\u00a021-year-old Morgan Taylor told national broadcaster ABC in a recent interview.<\/a><\/p>\n It\u2019s a sadly familiar story, as other medical marijuana patients in other countries with either no medical marijuana access or access so restrictive that it is essentially an abstraction have been forced to take similar measures.<\/p>\n Most recently, the mother of\u00a0Billy Caldwell<\/a>, a 12-year-old boy with severe epilepsy from Northern Ireland, had to travel to Canada in order to access cannabis oil.<\/p>\n Back in Australia, Morgan Taylor is now a legally registered patient\u2014but because of chronic pain, not for her Crohn\u2019s. Her 25-year-old sister, Ariel, who also suffers from Crohn\u2019s, is still not a legal patient.<\/p>\n They rely on cannabis oil prepared by their father\u2014who was recently arrested and given six months of probation for growing the plants required to make it.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, his daughters have been \u201cin and out of the hospital several times this year.\u201d<\/p>\n In order for someone to legally access cannabis in Australia, they must navigate a \u201clengthy application process\u201d through the country\u2019s Therapeutic Goods Administration. To do that, they must find also find a doctor willing to assist them.<\/p>\n And, as Bastian Seidel, president of the Royal College of General Practitioners,\u00a0told ABC,<\/a>\u00a0only one of his 38,000 members is authorized to do that. Meaning, effectively, medical cannabis is \u201cpretty much inaccessible\u201d for patients who would benefit from it.<\/p>\n \u201cThe hurdles are still in place,\u201d he told the broadcaster. \u201cCertainly this is not what patients expect. That\u2019s not what should be in place when it comes to medicinal cannabis.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Iain McGregor, a Sydney University-based researcher, as many as 100,000 Australians may be illegally using cannabis to alleviate medical problems.<\/p>\n The situation in Australia is similar\u00a0to that seen in some<\/a>\u00a0U.S. states where medical cannabis is technically legal, but so severely restricted in various ways that most patients\u2019 best option is to patronize the black market.<\/p>\n In possibly the most egregious example, there are 59,000 registered medical marijuana patients in New York State \u2014\u00a0out of \u201chundreds of thousands with eligible illnesses.<\/a>\u201d And even someone \u201clucky\u201d enough to become registered may live several hours\u2019 drive away from one of the state\u2019s 20 dispensaries.<\/p>\n TELL US<\/strong>,\u00a0do you have access to medical cannabis?<\/p>\n The post Australian Medical Marijuana Patients Can\u2019t Get Any Cannabis<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
In Australia, a continent-country of 24 million people, there are 38,000 physicians licensed to work as general practitioners. In Australia, a country where medical marijuana has been legal since 2016 for anyone with a doctor\u2019s note to use it, there is exactly one general practitioner \u2014 out of 38,000 \u2014Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[271,5109,4657,50,136,4327,53,139,5110],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28148"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28148\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28149,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28148\/revisions\/28149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: Australian Medical Marijuana Patients Can\u2019t Get Any Cannabis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"