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A Newcastle pharmacist is leading a push to make access to medicinal cannabis easier, for terminally-ill patients.
He believe’s there’s a flaw in the current system, when it comes to how those in need can get help.
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About Emma Murphy
The real reason cannabis is prohibited, is because it provides an organic, sustainable, non-toxic alternative to powerful vested interests, including alcohol, tobacco and, in particular, the pharmaceutical industry, that Prof. Peter Gøtzsche exposes in his 2013 book ‘Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare.’
The federal government, via the Therapeutic Goods Administration, accepts the aggregated information submitted by pharmaceutical companies seeking approval, without first analysing the raw data. The TGA then allows them to market their often inadequately assessed products in Australia: Pfizer, Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Roche, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Eli Lilly and Abbott Laboratories – Gotzsche’s ten companies in his ‘Hall of Shame for Big Pharma’, have all been found guilty and fined for criminal offences. Bayer, Novo Nordisk, Purdue, Wyeth and several others also have criminal records. Eli Lilly pleaded guilty in 2009 to criminal charges of illegal off-label marketing of olanzapine [Zyprexa], the lethal antipsychotic drug implicated in severe adverse side effects and many suicides.
The world’s largest pharmaceutical company, Pfizer, another repeat offender, was fined US$2.3 billion in 2009 for ‘intent to defraud or mislead’, and has been charged with further offences since then. Yet the TGA still allows these companies to push their drugs in Australia, yielding to pharmaceutical industry pressure, and following the equally compromised and ineffectual US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
As Prof. Gøtzsche’s book reveals, pharmaceutical companies’ sales teams (‘educators’) befriend and bribe influential individuals and organisations, including regulatory agencies, while pharmaceutical company research departments often manipulate trial protocols and falsify research findings.
Meanwhile, many otherwise law-abiding citizens are treated as criminals for choosing cannabis, as safer and more effective in controlling and sometimes curing their conditions, in preference to the hazardous, synthesized products made by these corporate criminals. Likewise, many recreational users prefer cannabis as safer and more agreeable than alcohol or tobacco.
Inspired and emboldened by the likes of Thomas Jefferson – ‘When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes duty’ – many otherwise law-abiding citizens will continue to resist, to defy, and to assert their rights to make informed decisions about their, and their children’s, health and wellbeing.
Does anyone seriously expect adult Australians to trust a political establishment with shameful conflicts-of-interest, an establishment that prohibits the planet’s most useful, versatile, non-toxic herb, on spurious ‘health/safety’ grounds; while taking bribes – ‘donations’ – from the ‘Toxic Trio’: alcohol, pharmaceutical and tobacco corporations, all with vested interests in maintaining the status quo?
Australians deserve better from our elected representatives. Moreover, taxpayers need to know they are subsidising dangerous, potentially lethal drugs made by untrustworthy companies with criminal records.
I invite you to draw your own inferences, and demand our PM initiate a royal commission into pharmaceutical industry corruption.
Well said Gordon #cannawarrior
Time to feed our people cake
Gordon you always hit it on the head, you speak truth and wisdom!
That a government can restrict the use of a medicine that would benefit thousands of people NOT YET DYING, but help prevent someone from being TERMINALLY ILL, is unconscionable. The internet is letting the ordinary person be more aware of alternative health care: something the medical and pharmaceutical industries have claimed as their own unique (God-like) knowledge for too long. This medicine can help with epilepsy, depression, chronic back pain…..the list of BODY and MIND benefits is huge. While the “MEDICO’s” prescribe synthetic pharma’s and scream about the danger of cannabis……ask….how many people have died in the past 1000 years from using it, in comparison to the deaths and side effects of tablets. THAT is your answer……. To the CONTROL MERCHANTS: get out!!!
The TGA effectively just banned non therapeutic claim CBD skin creams which were legal before yesterday by making a sly unexpected unplanned change to the cannabinoid scheduling. It also makes a limit for CBD in hemp seed oil at the same milligrams as the limit they used to have for THC. CBD is not THC so stop pretending it is. No other country does this. The TGA can go the way of the US DEA and FDA, wording themselves into irrelevance. If they keep this pharma control over plants up the people will soon go for full legalisation and put them out of a job altogether.
#truestory time to overgrow our country…
This item should be updated to reflect a recent change in NSW policy.
Medicinal cannabis may now be prescribed for a NON TERMINAL patient who is suffering from a PERMANENT
disease, subject to a specialist being the one doing the prescribing.
This government is doing one thing and that is looking after big companies back pockets nothing more that is what this whole fight is about money and nothing but money not health not well being its money
It is ridiculous in these times, with all the knowledge, experience and evidence that CANNABIS is a natural healer for a complete array of medical conditions, we have to literally beg our pathetic government into growing some balls for once and doing what is right for the people of Australia!
What these evil Corporations haven’t stopped to think about is, it will one day be their own children, grandchildren and so on that battle the aftermath of their forefathers prohibitions. These Corporations including the Govt cannot take their mighty millions with them when they die, and their fortunes will never heal their families, only legalisation of the most healing and useful plant/herb on this planet will ever change things for the better… Never before has this scripture ever made so much sense: ‘For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil’. 1 Timothy 6:10