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THE OIREACHTAS HEALTH Committee has recommended that medicinal cannabis be paid for by the State and that, pending approval from healthcare authorities, it should be made available to patients as soon as possible.
Pending their approval, the committee has recommended that certain cannabidiol products, such as Charlotte’s Web and Epidiolex, be made available to patients as speedily and as cost-effectively as possible.
However, a product cannot be approved for medicinal use in patients unless it is first authorised by the Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA).
At a meeting in November, the Health Committee heard from Vera Twomey, who has been canvassing for medicinal cannabis to be made available after it had a positive effect on her daughter Ava, who suffers from a rare form of epilepsy called Dravet’s Syndrome.
Also at that meeting, the chief executive of the HPRA told Committee members that Minister for Health Simon Harris had petitioned the body to conduct a swift review on how medicinal cannabis could be approved and safely made available to patients.
A bill put forth to legalise medicinal cannabis by AAA-PBP’s Gino Kenny and Richard Boyd Barrett was passed in the Dáil after the government chose not to oppose the proposals.
At the time, Minister Simon Harris said: “I share the concerns of patients who believe that cannabis should be a treatment option for certain medical conditions and I recognise the urgency and worry they feel.”
In the Health Committee report’s recommendations, they do point out that they are contingent on the report from the HPRA but cater for different scenarios.
In the event that high-CBD products, such as Charlotte’s Web or Epidiolex, can be authorised as medicines, the Committee said that any practical matters around authorisation, supply and prescription should be “pursued as speedily as possible”.
In terms of cost, they say that these “implications for families [should] be looked at, and that efforts to mainstream such products should include making them affordable”. They add:
This includes the potential to make them free of charge as part of the long-term illness scheme in order to reduce any onerous or prohibitive cost burden on families.
Regarding THC, the ingredient of cannabis which gives the ‘high’ but which has also been cited as more effective in treating some illnesses, the Committee had two recommendations depending on the view that the HPRA takes on the issue.
If the HPRA takes the view that there is not yet enough evidence of its efficacy and safety, the Committee recommends revisiting the topic at a later stage.
If the HPRA were to take a positive view, however, they recommend standardising the levels of cannabinoids in products to prevent the leakage of supply to recreational markets.
The report also recommends the long-term tracking of medicinal cannabis users in Ireland so that research can be done to contribute “to the global store of medical knowledge of cannabinoids”.
Earlier this month, the UK’s equivalent of the HPRA, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), officially classed CBD used for medicinal purposes as a medicine.
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Watch how profits from a plant will be handed straight to big pharma. I would like to see us avoiding the mistakes many other countries have made. Allowing patients a licence to grow it at home, at least o cases where the need is urgent would be a good start.
If that’s too much to ask, then have designated growers, run and owned by government, supply those in need of it. But don;t give it to big pharma to dominate.
Listen people the government is going to sell us out just grow your smoke your own make your own oil these clowns dont want this to destroy their profits they dont give too fooks about anybody.demand full legislation of cannabis settle for nothing less .
What we should do is invite rick simpson to Ireland.
Here’s a sobering thought…..
If this passes and cannabis for medical use becomes widely availabe and affordable, People Before Profits Gino Kenny will have done more to help relieve the suffering of the sick than most TDs manage in a lifetime.
* ‘will have done more to help relieve the suffering of the sick in his first year in the Dail than most TDs manage in a lifetime.’
Hoping they don’t just make sativex and Marinol and other similar products legal they are ridiculously over priced, just skip all the rigmarole and allow people to grow their own!
People want to grow their own to get high. I personally now have no objections with that. However to suggest playing games with health and using it medicinally for seizures etc would be clearly ridiculous. Obviously purely for pain relief I can see how that might work. But to prevent seizures, especially in children, wouldn’t you want to know what dose of the drug the child is getting? To give an analogy, I can’t imagine you would think it reasonable to ask people to pick some penicillin containing fungus to treat pneumonia, clearly you want to know the exact content and dose to give.
@John B: Firstly, whatever you decide to use, you can get them measured/inspected.
Then when it comes to growing, using clones and the same growlight setup, would yield very similar results for each harvest (given your plants are healthy). You can also ‘brew’ your own Rick Simpson oil and save a fortune.
Cannabis has never killed anybody in centuries of use, so there should be a tolerance allowed due to this fact.
@John B: Also, what’s wrong with enjoying something relaxing? You can brew your own beer, why not grow some herbs? Growing would effect others even less than the current situation, where people fund gangs because they’re not allowed to grow a plant.
Wesley read my post. I said that I do not have personal objections to people growing their own to get high, but let’s just be realistic and recognize that home growers are doing so for that purpose. And seriously, if any of my children ever develop seizures and hopefully they never will, I will want them to receive known concentrations of drugs. I certainly don’t want to grow my own and hope as you say that there is consistency and risk the child being too sedated some days or having seizures other days.
@John B: I was referring to your suggestion that having an alternative, free, instantly available source was ‘playing games with health’.
I do agree, it completely depends on the circumstances. There are tonnes of ways to source it and to use it, along with plenty of reasons why it’s the best choice for some. I’m just saying, we shouldn’t slam the door on the most democratic way to provide this and hand the keys over to big pharma and bury it behind red tape.
If potheads want it, they can already source it quite easily. Those 2 tonnes seized recently hasn’t had much of an effect, since so many grow here already.
@Wesley Moore: John has a point. If this is really about cannabis as a medicine then it should be produced and distributed like one. Getting it legalised to grow yourself for whatever reason is a different battle that we can fight a different day.
@Carl Nolan: I get your sentiment, but people are getting locked up on a daily basis for something that should be a legitimate business. Allowing small personal grows or larger club grows would benefit those that need it as medication also. It will be years before it’s looked at again!
This isn’t progressive news on our part. Surely these cannabis oil products are not the proper article ,we need to legalise the plant as as ever ,our health system is moving slower than people are .How dare the green be illegal in 2017 and thc must be legalised for use by patients now.
They would want to cop on and legalise full plant extracts to include THC as this is the effective component for cancer treatment ! HPRA are still clueless regarding cannabis as a medicine !!
Just to clarify, it is not a cancer treatment, it is however useful to treat nausea and pain in cancer patients.
@John B: just to clarify –> john is talking off the top of his head https://www.leafly.com/news/science-tech/government-run-cancer-institute-quietly-acknowledges-that-cannabi
Patient nibbler: lots of things kill cancer cells, in a laboratory: water, salt, too much glucose. What is important is whether or not the pharmacology enables it to be bioactive in the body. Less than 5% of positive findings on cells in a dish ever make it to human effectiveness. And there isn no such thing as a miracle cure. Cannabis is a drug, no different to any other drug in that it binds certain receptor in the body and produces a biological effect. To claim that cannabis is the cure for every health problem from MS to cancer is just not biologically plausible.
As I stated it is useful in dealing with cancer nausea etc but does not cure cancer.
@John B: did i say that john? did i say it was a cure for everything?
@patient pNibbler: maybe your voice can kill cancer cells in a lab setting too?
@John B: rick simpson says it does I have more respect for him than our poxy government.
Patient I never said you did either.
Bobby: I am not doubting the findings that cannabinoids kill cells in a dish. But as I said, it’s not too hard to kill cells in a dish, water and salt can kill cells in a dish. But cancer cells don’t exist in a dish, they exist in bodies, surrounded by immune cells, goo, blood vessels, lymphatic vessels etc. To work in a human it has to get to the target, and in acceptable doses kill cancer cells in the body. That is a different challenge.
Research is promising but I hate that patients can have false hope. There are many sad stories of patients who lap up preliminary findings and abandon proven treatments for canabinoids. It’s easy to see why people do that. Cancer sucks ass. Chemo is horrible and so is surgery and radiotherapy. Thus a claim of a natural cure sounds fantastic.
They have 32 millions worth ar their disposal now, great time to get it done.
Shouldn’t actually be a problem to run samples through gas chromatography to make sure it’s not been sprayed with anything nasty and process it…
DOB POT INC
Dobbies Doobies….
Followed by Maltese Munchies
Medical cannabis, if approved, would be controlled and regulated in the same manner as any other prescribed drug. Only a simpleton would suggest the approval of growing such herbs by private individuals.
@Paddy Lions: Yes, because our newspapers are filled with tragic stories and violent incidents because of cannabis.
No, wait, its that other drug, alcohol, that I’m thinking of….
@Paddy Lions: I think you are the simpleton – once pharma are involved the price will become expensive. Plants can be grown & refined under license, so long as it is regulated.
I’m one of your “simpletons” who has been growing and using his own ganja for the past 5 years. Once you see it’s a simple plant – like my parsley and peppers, among many others – you appreciate even more what ignorant nonsense know-nothings like you spout about weed.
@paddy lions in that case why do simpletons allow the sale of alcohol to a nation of alcoholics.
Go smoke a bong you spa
@ivan Why?
@Kevin I’d recommend removing that comment for your own safety. No need to give the gardai a reason to come round and giving you hassle.
@Paddy Lions:
Only a simpleton would discount private individuals qualified horticulturalists as an option for producing drug strain cannabis….you know those folk who understand pesticides, insecticides, plant genetics, pathogens ect.
Who do you think grows cannabis for the drug companies, research scientists?
I doubt they’ll be heading over to him in California…
Do the garda still do that, i cant remember the last time i heard of a bust for 20 euros of mary jane.. years ago maybe.
@Jimmy Berg: They have the power to, which is ridiculous.. Needs to be legalised!
@Paddy Lions: go on line and educate yourself self on cannabis remedies there’s even videos there for you .for the non believers.
@ Derek – see @ Les comment. I’m not a “simpleton” – in the spirit of this thread. But I appreciate your concern very much.
Sure why wouldn’t it be free, it grows practically anywhere in less than 8 weeks. It is a weed after all
32 million worth of cannabis seized at Dublin port. Hand it over to a lab to extract CBD and HTC for medical use. Huge cost saving for the taxpayer.
Use that big seizure of cannabis for medicinal purposes
have your say