...Cannabis maintains its mystique in the drug culture. Best of luck in your attempts to "gentrify" the use of the product that it is.

...Cannabis is also an established player in the black market economy, and many of our poor trade it for survival...be careful your attempts to justify its use don't adversely affect its established and important current benefit to the poor

Please save us the medical details, Kerri: even if cannabis could produce the elixir of immortality, this would remain a political issue rather than a medical one.

Once Australia has its own nuclear and biological weapons, then it could decide its own policy regarding cannabis, just as it could then also refuse to sign certain nasty international agreements, but meanwhile we have no choice but follow the American dictates or else be invaded by China.

You are probably aware how it all started, in America where historically, the powerful cotton-growers' lobby managed to ban hemp, which produces much stronger ropes that could have taken the cotton-growers out of business.

Yes and given its effectiveness and for a variety of symptoms including age related depression, a better change of legal measures/outcomes, than say, euthanasia?

I believe the critical substance can be removed by soaking the plant material in alcohol for a month or so, (make mine a single malt) (well I am a tripled distilled Celt) then using fractional, vacuum assisted, very low heat distillation to remove the alcohol if that were desirable? (Sob!)

Which would then allow a thoroughly sanitized material to be encapsulated and administered as a medication that produces a similar effect, without any of the undesirable side effects or negative health issues? (Smoker's cough!?)

However and given it's a vascular dilator, the "single malt" could be retained and taken as a 5 ml tonic (teaspoonful) 3 times a day? (Och aye the noo, tha's a very bitty wee drrram!)

It is true that almost everything in "nature" is beneficial, even i.e., arsenic, strychnine, stone or jelly fish poison, but only if taken in the properly prepared appropriate moderation!
Rhrosty.

Just eat it. Maybe not the same "hit" but longer lasting. Maybe not as "efficient", but who cares? And what a source of fibre. High Fibre nibblies anyone?

Rusty.

Medical cannabis when offered in its refined form offers many benefits without the residual effects of a narcotic.

If Australia is a signature to some convention regarding the cultivating and use of these plants therefore drug sale then why.
In Tasmania there are fields of opiate poppy grown, harvested and processed for medical grade opium?
This must surely be illegal under this outdated convention.