People with a prescription will be able to pick up medicinal cannabis from a pharmacy under legislation introduced yesterday.
The change to the Misuse of Drugs Act will ensure terminally ill people with less than 12 months to live will not be prosecuted for having illicit cannabis. Although it is not legal for them to use cannabis, they will not be criminalised for doing so.
Health Minister David Clark said the compassionate measure legalised what some people were already doing, and would ensure no prosecutions while the new prescribing framework was set up.
Much of the detail of how the new scheme will work is still unclear, but it aims to make medicinal cannabis more readily available for people with terminal illnesses or chronic pain.
An advisory committee will review the requirements for prescribing medicinal cannabis products, including the requirement for a doctor to apply to the Ministry of Health for approval to prescribe products containing THC.
The committee is also to give advice about how the prescribing process will work once the new medicinal cannabis scheme is running.
Dr Clark said, based on the Australian experience, it was likely to take up to 24 months before medicinal cannabis was manufactured and sold in New Zealand.
University of Otago researcher Geoff Noller has hailed proposed new legislation as a ''watershed moment in New Zealand cannabis policy''.
Dr Noller, who has a PhD on aspects of cannabis use, said the Bill was a move that ushered in the biggest change in New Zealand cannabis legislation in more than 50 years.
This was a courageous step by the new Government, but was also somewhat cautious and not ''foolhardy'', he said.
Cannabis reform was ''complex'', but it had long been hard to have a rational national conversation about the clear therapeutic benefits of medicinal cannabis, including in chronic pain management.
''We've now clearly moved into the realm where we can have a serious conversation about this.''.
Dr Noller said it was significant Dr Clark had made it clear he would be dealing with this matter himself, whereas cannabis-related matters had previously been left in the hands of former associate health minister Peter Dunne.
Dr Noller, who is an assistant research fellow in the Otago University department of general practice and rural health, said he strongly agreed with many of the comments made yesterday by Drug Foundation executive director Ross Bell, who said the legislation provided a ''solid framework'' to oversee the domestic cultivation and manufacture of medicinal cannabis products. But Mr Bell said the estimated two years to set up the scheme was far too long.
Dr Noller endorsed Mr Bell's call for medical cannabis patients to be represented on the advisory committee.
The Government had made a good start, but another issue that would soon need to be dealt with was the need to support people who were not terminally ill, but who experienced chronic disabling pain, which greatly reduced their quality of life.
-Additionally reported by Nicholas James of NZME
