Australia Wants to be World’s Main Cannabis Exporter While Denying It To Its Citizens

By Markab Algedi

Americans on the entire West Coast, Colorado, Alaska, and a few other states are enjoying fully legal, recreational cannabis finally. Many US states at least allow medical cannabis, and you don’t have to have cancer to get it. Australia is much different.

There simply isn’t as much of a culture surrounding cannabis in Australia. About 1 in 8 Americans smoke weed regularly according to statistics, and somewhere around 1 in 33 Australians regularly ingest cannabis.

As if the tax revenue or business would even vaguely effect the lives of average Australians, Greg Hunt is promoting the idea of Australia becoming the world’s leading supplier of medical cannabis.

However, even medical cannabis is still nearly impossible to get in Australia. People who smoke are looked at as criminals for certain still: most people do not indulge in Australia.

“We’d like to be potentially the world’s number one supplier,” Health Minister of Australia Greg Hunt said in January.

Without much consideration to the citizens of Australia and cannabis, a director at investment firm Peak Asset Management Niv Dagan said this idea “opens the floodgates for further overseas investment into Australia.”

According to CNN:

“He forecasts that the market for Australian medicinal cannabis products will quadruple to $1 billion by 2020.The news gave a massive lift to the share prices of Australian companies that grow cannabis for medical purposes.

The stock of one cultivation firm, Cann Group, surged 35% in Sydney on Thursday.”

In 2016, medical cannabis was officially “legalized” in Australia. But it rarely is given out to anybody, and children are taken from parents for being treated with cannabis oil. Fathers are arrested for trying to treat their children with what is legal and obviously successful in the US.

It was recently reported that this would change, and doctors would get approval or rejection from a government agency on requests for permission to treat an individual patient with cannabis in just 36 hours, rather than waiting a month.

So the current system is, ask your doctor if they would kindly ask the government if you can personally have a plant, wait several months, and then probably be rejected. And you’re supposed to have tried and failed to be treated from every other type of “medicine” possible before cannabis. That’s ridiculous and humiliating.

People are arrested every year for cannabis in Australia: from growing it, to smoking it, to treating family members with it.

One man, Adam Koessler was arrested in 2015 for treating his 2 year old daughter with cannabis oil, after she was diagnosed with stage 4 Neuroblastoma.

“Her cancer-ridden little body was alive again— Rumer had almost instant quality of life,” Koessler said. “She would say, ‘Daddy, tummy’s not sore,’ and she would be able to eat like a champion and begin to gain weight,” he said about the cannabis oil therapy.

“Her skin color came back, her eyes were sparkling again and we just looked at each other in complete amazement,” he said.

A NY Times headline from just last month reads “Even Australia’s Medical Marijuana Poster Boy Can’t Get the Drug.”  Reading from it:

“Lindsay Carter had his first violent seizure at 14. He toppled face first onto a tiled floor in front of his father. At 19, Mr. Carter can still have seizures several times a month that can convulse his body and threaten his life. But more often, the recent high school graduate experiences “focal seizures,” which temporarily arrest his ability to speak or comprehend.

When he gets what he describes as “clouds in my head,” he turns to a legal but difficult to obtain remedy – medical marijuana”

“But in a cruel paradox, people like Mr. Carter – who has been told he has a brain tumor and epilepsy – find it hard to get the drug in their country. Bureaucracy and regulation, uninformed doctors, limited supply and high costs make what in some cases could be a lifesaving drug nearly impossible to obtain.”

“In a few weeks, his dwindling legal cannabis supply will run out, and it could take up to seven months to get more His only option will then be to leave the country with his mother to get marijuana, his fifth such trip in four years.”

So Lindsay Carter is incapable of acquiring black market cannabis oil because in Australia, the people don’t as frequently break the law when it is not righteous like in America. Cannabis was legalized in many American states because of the power of the people, because everyone who wanted to smoke cannabis did as they please anyway.

A little over a couple weeks ago, in Berri, South Australia a poor man who owned a vineyard and simply wanted to grow a little cannabis was busted by the police. Sotirios Koutouzis, 43 was found guilty of two counts of trafficking in a commercial quantity of a controlled drug, and cultivating a large commercial quantity of controlled plants for sale.

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About 3 months ago, a $60 million cannabis crop was busted in Queensland, Australia. The value is probably wildly different from what it is actually worth because apparently the authorities don’t know anything about it. It was 11,000 plants.

The hypocrisy of the Australian government to try and become a national weed dealer to countries where it is legal abroad while denying all of its citizens the right to use recreationally and most the right to use medicinally, is unacceptable.

(Image credit: NY Times, Governing, Adam Koessler, Edge Canopy)

This article may be freely republished with attribution to the author, and a working link back to this article at Edge Canopy.

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