Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am trying to be objective but when I heard the HPRA report was out, a small part of me wondered if maybe it was progress and that it might be a small step towards what we set out seven or eight months ago and that people who are suffering unnecessarily could gain access to medicinal cannabis. I thought there could be a small bit of small progress but then I read the HPRA report and what exactly the cannabis access programme is. The cannabis access programme being approved by the Government is not progress; it is regressive. It stipulates three conditions but leaves out chronic pain. This is absolutely bizarre. The Barnes report, which is a very well respected report, states that chronic pain is the No. 1 issue where medical cannabis can be very effective. That is across the board. The three conditions named in the programme are spasticity, intractable epilepsy and the side-effects of chemotherapy. What drugs will be administered for those treatments?

I understand the drugs that will be administered for those three treatments will be Sativex, Epidiolex and probably one or two other pharmaceutical-grade cannabis-based products. There is a family in the North of Ireland whose daughter has Dravet syndrome and who have been turned down for Epidiolex. If the cannabis access programme stipulates that it can be administered only in pharmaceutical-grade products, it is going nowhere. We set out seven or eight months ago that people should have access to the full plant extract.

There have been two applications for licences. One was successful while the other was not, which is good for one family and very bad for the other. The officials say that this is the kind of programme which the Minister can admit. What do they say to hundreds of people who want to access that licence system? It is completely unsustainable. The Minister will have 400 or 500 applications in respect of the system. I would like the officials to comment on that. I asked Mike Barnes last week what he thought of our compassionate access scheme for a licence and he said it is completely unworkable. That is why we want our Bill to go through, to give the many who could benefit from it access to medicinal cannabis on the full plant extract.

As Deputy Boyd Barrett said, there is duplication. If the HPRA can do what we propose in the Bill for a cannabis regulation authority, so be it. I do not want duplication or another quango in this country. If that can do exactly what the cannabis regulation authority and the cannabis research institute can do, I am happy to say let us get on with the job. If it cannot, we have a big problem and the regulation authority and the research institute have to be put in place. Otherwise, the Bill deteriorates.

I would like Mr. Lennon to answer some questions on points I have heard in the past couple of months about medicinal cannabis. I wish Deputy O'Connell was still here to answer too. She stated that one can overdose on CBD oil but one cannot. She also said there will be blood on the hands of the State if this legislation goes through. That is quite an extraordinary statement. She then made parallels between thalidomide and cannabis. That is another extraordinary statement.