Polling conducted by Essential Media Communications last year shows Australia-wide support for legalising cannabis.

Of the states in the Essential poll with large enough sample sizes, South Australia leads with 57 per cent agreeing and Victoria sits at the bottom end of the scale with 47 per cent agreeing. The rest either reach or exceed 50 per cent.

Overall results of Essential’s 2023 August polling (nationwide result) (n=1,150).

Results of Essential’s 2023 August polling, sorted by state.

Change in public opinion towards cannabis legalisation, 2004-2019 (National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2019, Table 9.26)

The Essential poll surveyed 1,150 people (with a 3.1% margin of error) The results were in line with increasing support shown year on year through the National Drug Strategy Household Survey, which in 2019 gathered 22,274 responses.

Despite public support, recreational cannabis is only legal for the 1.75 per cent of the Australian population who reside in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) but it is still unregulated and untaxed.

States of play

In 2020, the ACT government made it legal for adults to possess up to 50 grams of dried cannabis or 150 grams of fresh cannabis. Additionally, Canberrans can grow up to two plants per person, maxing out at four plants per household.

It’s still an offence to consume in a public place, grow using hydroponics or other artificial cultivation processes, grow where the public can reach it, expose young children to cannabis smoke, or store cannabis where children can reach it.

Laws regarding distribution and driving under the influence remain the same as in other states — in short, you can’t.

South Australia and the Northern Territory — seen in yellow above — are somewhere in the middle when it comes to legalisation.

In these jurisdictions, minor amounts of cannabis have been decriminalised since 1987 and 1996, respectively.

South Australia’s Controlled Substances (Expiation Of Simple Cannabis Offences) Regulations 1987 decriminalised the possession of minor amounts of cannabis, cannabis resin, and plants. The Misuse of Drugs Amendment Act 1996 did the same in the Northern Territory.

Decriminalisation is not the same as legalisation. Possessing the prescribed amounts is still illegal, but it won’t land you a stint in jail or anything on your record — unless you fail to pay the fine given when caught.

In South Australia the maximum fees for different types of cannabis possession and use are:

State roadblocks

South Australia is also the state with the greatest support for legalisation, according to the August 2023 polling.

In the South Australian parliament, SA Greens’ Tammy Franks MLC has championed the issue of legalisation in the upper house.

“The reason I have chosen to, at a state level, move on this is because every single parliament and every jurisdiction needs to be having these conversations, and until we have the conversations like the one we’re having here, we don’t shift stigma,” Ms Franks says.

Franks introduced the Cannabis Legalisation Bill 2022 to parliament in mid-May 2022, and, while not expecting it to pass without Labor or Liberal support, she is hoping it begins a conversation in parliament.

“I am not hopeful of the bill getting the numbers anytime soon, but I am hopeful that in my time in parliament we will see a massive shift — just as we did when the Greens led the charge to legalise the growth of industrial hemp in this state and successfully got that legislation through,” Ms Franks says.

“That took a lot of myth busting. Legalising cannabis has been an easier journey because we’ve had some of those conversations, not about just hemp, but of course, medicinal cannabis,” she says.

Legalising recreational cannabis is a hard sell, with both major parties at a federal and state level opposing it, but medicinal cannabis is another story.

A spokesperson from the South Australian opposition, the SA Liberals, says they are committed to gaining a thorough understanding of the facts surrounding medicinal cannabis legislation.

“Right now, members of the opposition are participating in the Joint Committee on the Legalisation of Medicinal Cannabis, allowing us to better understand cannabis use and make informed decisions, based on evidence, regarding its future regulation,” a spokesperson for the opposition says.

The Joint Committee conducted consultations from 10 March 2023 to 28 April 2023 and received 19 submissions from everyday people and organisations, both positive and negative.

Queensland Director of Drug Free Australia Herschel Baker says the organisation he represents does not support the legalisation of cannabis and includes 36 excerpts from news and journal articles and US government websites in their submission.

“… Under the banner of personal choice, Australia is running a general experiment in exploitation — addicting our more vulnerable neighbours to myriad pleasant-seeming vices, handing our children over to the social media dopamine machine and spreading degradation wherever so-called medical marijuana weed shops flourish.”

While their submission doesn’t directly oppose legalisation, the South Australian Police outline their opposition to any potential changes to the law which may introduce a legal defence for drug driving.

“SAPOL is not supportive of any amendments to legislation that promote such an action to occur (this includes a defence for drivers to knowingly drive their vehicles after they have consumed a cannabis product containing THC),” South Australian Commissioner of Police Grant Stevens writes in the submission.

THC is the active ingredient that produces the high one associates with cannabis, whereas CBD doesn’t produce a high, but a relaxing, even pain relieving, effect. Currently, unapproved CBD products can contain varying levels of THC.

“There is now a variety of medicinal cannabis products available with high THC. Examples include Bedrocan Cannabis Flos (22% THC) and Beacon Medical Silver Haze (18%),” Stevens writes.

“The Bedrocan Cannabis Flos cannot be distinguished from illicit cannabis.”

The tax incentive

The Cannabis Legalisation Bill 2022 (and its federal counterpart, Legalising Cannabis Bill 2023) intend to, alongside legalising cannabis, establish agencies to regulate and tax its growth, manufacture and sale.

The bill’s sponsor, Australian Greens Senator for NSW David Shoebridge, says a major factor for legalising cannabis federally is the effect it will have on crime, restorative justice, and its authority over all states and territories, bypassing separate bills in each jurisdiction.

“Wouldn’t it be amazing, with just one piece of legislation through one parliament, we could legalise cannabis for the entire bloody country and have a single unified market?” Senator Shoebridge says.

“With that one bill, we can pull 80,000 people out of the criminal justice system every year.”

However, Shoebridge concedes that the Greens’ vision of restorative justice will require further legislative work with states and territories.

“The Federal Parliament can’t remove past state criminal convictions. Getting rid of past convictions for something that’s no longer a crime is a necessary thing that would follow after legalising cannabis,” Shoebridge says.

“Once we legalise cannabis federally, we’ll have to go and do that on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis.”

While the Greens are currently leading the charge to legalise recreational cannabis, cannabis policy isn’t just limited to the left-wing of politics; notionally right-wing parties such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation argue for increased medicinal marijuana accessibility.

During the second reading of One Nation’s Improving Access to Medicinal Cannabis Bill 2023, Senator Pauline Hanson argued the health benefits and the demand for medicinal cannabis among patients required a new look at the current laws.

“With clear evidence that medicinal cannabis is effective in treating a wide range of conditions and with clear evidence that it is in high demand in Australia, it is time to elevate it as the primary healthcare option it should be,” Senator Hanson says.

This bill is opposed by the major parties in the senate, where Tasmanian Labor Senator Anne Urquhart says the proposed changes are not well structured, citing concerns the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) has.

“The TGA have advised they have serious concerns with both proposals put forward in the bill. It seems that the impacts of the proposed bill have not been carefully considered,” Senator Urquhart says.

“It leads me to question how much research and consultation went into the drafting of this bill. The government considers this proposal to be inappropriate, as the current scheduling of these substances is the result of a long and well-considered process based on clinical evidence and expert advice,” she says.

South Australian Liberal Senator Anne Ruston, in a speech regarding the bill, says:

“Whilst the coalition appreciates the work that One Nation has done with this bill and the intent of this bill, there remain some serious concerns around the details that would allow the scheduling of a medicinal cannabis product to a schedule 4 [prescription-only] item.”

If the Greens legislation is passed federally, it will allow the growing of up to six plants per household without a licence and make the smoking of cannabis at licenced cannabis cafes and in private residences legal.

Additionally, consumption of cannabis via smoking or vaping in public places will be aligned with current public tobacco smoking rules.

Meanwhile, the state bill focuses on removing the offences outlined in the Controlled Substances Act 1984, alongside a raft of other regulations.

Importantly for recreational users and Australia’s budget, cannabis prices are expected to decline, even with taxes bringing billions in public revenue, says Senator Shoebridge.

“We went to the Parliamentary Budget Office … they specialize in delivering bad news, and that’s good because you want some truth tellers there. So, we went to them and said, ‘well, if we legalise cannabis federally and we kept the GST and we put a 15 per cent cannabis sales tax on it, how much revenue would there be in the first 10 years?’

“They went away, they crunched the numbers, and they looked at the Canadian experience and in the Canadian experience the street price of cannabis has fallen by a bit over 50 per cent in the first five or six years of the operation of their bill. Some say even more.

“And they looked at what the assumed size of the market is in Australia and then they came out with a number, and it says at the end of the first nine years of operating of this legislation, there’s $28 billion of public revenue in that.”

The Greens aim to table the bill in early 2024.

Medicinal marijuana

One effect the Greens proposed federal legislation will have is removing barriers to accessing medicinal cannabis.

Medicinal cannabis has been legal nationwide since 2016, as a result of the Turnbull government’s Narcotic Drugs Amendment Act 2016, whichlegalised the cultivation, production, and distribution of medicinal marijuana solely for medical or research purposes.

But there’s an issue of access for Australians.

Only two medicinal cannabis products are approved by the TGA: Sativex (used to treat multiple sclerosis)and Epidyolex (used to treat rare forms of epilepsy).

Both require a prescription from a doctor or specialist and aren’t covered under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, meaning out of pocket costs can range from $50 to $1000 per week depending on the illness, the product and the dose.

Other medicinal cannabis products exist and are exported from and produced domestically, but local access and prescriptions are dependent on the medical practitioner having appropriate qualifications and/or expertise with the medical condition being treated.

Further, the practitioner is required to either apply through the Special Access Scheme or become an Authorised Prescriber to have their patients utilise unapproved products.

Guinevere Beck* shared her son’s experience navigating medicinal cannabis legislation and the justice system following their attempts to get the help he needed.

“We have a son who has an acquired brain injury and as a result has a very rare form of epilepsy. He has seizures and during his seizures his heart stops beating,” she says.

Beck says her son uses a homemade oil which is primarily cannabidiol (CBD), unlike recreational cannabis which has high levels of other cannabinoids, primarily tetrahydrocannabinol (THC).

“He’s got it down to a fine science and has been making his own oil from CBD plants, not THC.” “He managed to acquire some seeds that were pretty much 100 per cent CBD. Now, he was raided by the police,” she says.

“He went to court and, through my son and his lawyer, they insisted that the oil was tested, and it came back as CBD, therefore it was considered a foodstuff and not a drug, because it wasn’t THC.

“The lawyer said to him, ‘well, just go on doing what you’re doing.’”

CBD oil can be prescribed by doctors in varying doses, and legally bought over the counter in low doses (150mg per day) since the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) decided to move them from prescription-only to pharmacist-only in 2021.

But no CBD product is approved by the TGA for over-the-counter sale, and in practice one still needs a prescription to access medicinal cannabis.

“He grew five plants, understanding that was the legal limit, and he was raided again recently and is now before the courts,” she says.

“They took his oil, they took his plants, and he’s now having daily seizures and he’s in danger of dying because his heart stops beating.

“How do we fight something like that? Apart from this legislation?

“We need all politicians to hear these stories and to know what’s going on out in the community, because my son’s not the only one, I’m sure.”

Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute Dr Nicole Lee says that while legalisation doesn’t increase the amount of people using cannabis for medicinal purposes, it does have a raft of other positive benefits.

“In Canada legalisation of cannabis hasn’t impacted on the number of people who say they are using cannabis for medicinal purposes, but it has increased the proportion of people who access medicinal cannabis from legal sources and almost halved patients’ spending on cannabis,” Dr Lee says.

“It could mean that some people who might benefit from medical products but haven’t been able to access them could self-medicate, so expanding the medical cannabis system at the same time would be ideal so people who need it for medical purposes can do so under the care of a doctor or health professional.”

What might change in Australia?

Regulation has many benefits to society, says Dr Lee, mainly in reducing the harm resulting from current prohibition and the drug itself.

“Regulation reduces harm because it means that governments have control over who can manufacture, sell and buy, what can be in it, how strong it can be, who can use it and where,” Dr Lee says.

“Once cannabis is regulated it’s easier to deliver harm reduction messages through public health campaigns, education, and training so that consumers are aware of the risks of cannabis and may be more likely to go into treatment because there will be less stigma,” she says.

“Since cannabis was legalised in Canada, driving under the influence has reduced substantially. This is because more people are aware of the risks of driving under the influence.”

Echoing the sentiment of Senator Shoebridge, Dr Lee says regulation and legalisation will cut down on crime and remove people from the criminal justice system.

“The most harmful cannabis related crime is the circulation of unregulated products by the black market, fuelling organised crime,” Dr Lee says.

“Since Canada legalised cannabis, the majority of people who use cannabis now access approved, regulated products from a legal storefront. Buying from a dealer has decreased from 19 per cent in 2017 to 1 per cent in 2022, demonstrating that the cannabis black market in Canada has been practically eliminated,” she says.

“Among the biggest harms for cannabis users is coming into contact with the criminal justice system, so decriminalisation as a harm reduction measure reduces that significantly without increasing use. On the flip side, we know that a prohibition approach to cannabis doesn’t decrease use or harms.”

*Name changed for anonymity