Tuesday, 20 September 2022

 Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) (17:48): (2126) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Health and relates to schedule 9 permits. I have recently become aware of a consultation document published by the Department of Health in August this year proposing to restrict permits for schedule 9 poisons for human therapeutic use under the Drugs, Poisons and Controlled Substances Regulations 2017 to clinical trials only. The effect will be to limit, amongst other things, the currently approved medical use of MDMA and psilocybin outside of clinical trials. This will be a highly regressive change. Given the growing level of evidence supporting the use of these medicines, we have seen that the TGA is providing the special access scheme approval for these, following medical review, so we have got the checks and balances to ensure that this is appropriate treatment in the individual circumstances.

The rationale supposedly for this scheduling is uniformity. I think this is a pretty hollow argument given where we went with medicinal cannabis some years ago. We went out there and we have been at the forefront of psilocybin and MDMA, and in fact we are doing some quite remarkable work in this state in these areas. This follows a request that I made to the minister imploring the Department of Health to issue a schedule 9 permit to enable a psychiatrist with approval from the TGA under the special access scheme to treat a patient who was suffering from treatment-resistant PTSD, and that treatment was to be with MDMA and psychotherapy. Patients suffering from PTSD and other mental health conditions will be the losers out of this, and if these rules change it could prevent life-saving interventions, so the action I seek is that the minister reject this proposal outright.