Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 24 November 2016
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health
Legalisation of Medicinal Cannabis: Discussion
9:00 am
Dr. Colin Doherty:
I will go back over this and look at the last two or three drugs that we have. We are talking about several thousand patients in the trials. No deaths have been attributed to the drug but there have been deaths during the trials because the patients have very severe epilepsy and epilepsy causes death. None of the drugs has caused death, that we know of but it could do. It could be one in 5,000. Another drug caused liver failure in one in 5,000 patients and the drug was banned after the post-marketing analysis. It took several years to find the drug because it did not happen in the first couple of thousand patients treated.
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