New Zealand Doctors Are Signing Up For Hemp Medicine 101

Current barriers to medicinal cannabis are manifold: legislation, the prohibitive cost of approved drugs like Sativex, and a lack of knowledge among the country's health professionals. With the Labour-led government installed as of today—and the promise of a referendum on the legalisation of recreational cannabis by the 2020 election—it suddenly looks at least very possible that the first of those barriers will come down, with the second to follow logically. The third might take longer.

Enter Hemp Medicine 101, a course run by advocacy group The Hemp Foundation kicking off on November 18. The Hemp Foundation's Tadhg Stopford calls the course "an introduction to what cannabis is. It's an education as to what it does and how. It's the application—as in how doctors can use cannabis and cannabis medicines in their practice."

The course follows surveys taken by The Hemp Foundation that indicate ignorance, even among doctors, of the role that naturally occurring cannabinoids play within the body and of the benefits of raw dietary cannabis. The endogenous cannabinoid system (ECS) plays an important part in many physiological and cognitive processes—including appetite, fertility, and pain suppression—and yet the majority of medical professionals surveyed at both the Rotorua General Practice Conference and Medical Exhibition (GP CME) and the South GP CME in Christchurch didn't know of its existence. "They know about the respiratory system, they know about the circulatory system, they don't know about the endogenous cannabinoid system," Stopford says. At the Rotorua conference, for instance, only 30 percent of the 180 surveyed had, before the conference, known of the ECS.

81 percent of the 104 surveyed were in favour of cannabis being treated as a health issue, not a criminal one.

Lack of knowledge didn't stop the majority of respondents across the two conventions from being broadly in favour of cannabis law reform. In Christchurch, 81 percent of the 104 surveyed were in favour of cannabis being treated as a health issue, not a criminal one. Eighty-nine percent of respondents at the Rotorua conference indicated the same. At both—66 percent in Rotorua, 52 percent in Christchurch—the surveys delivered majorities for those in favour of removing cannabis from the Misuse of Drugs Act.

Stopford says most healthcare professionals were receptive to what The Hemp Foundation had to say at the conferences. "There was a minority who just didn't want to know. But most people were just like, 'OK, this is useful' and 'Oh my God, we have an endogenous cannabinoid system and it does what?'"

Along with initiatives such as Hemp Medicine 101, engagement such as that undertaken at the conferences is part of The Hemp Foundation's method of effecting change. "Educate and activate, because once people understand that cannabinoids are the essential messengers of their health, then we'll be on the way to using it properly."

Which is not to say Stopford or The Hemp Foundation has anything against recreational use of marijuana. "Cannabis is not about smoking joints. But if you want to smoke a joint, and you don't have a history of mental illness in your family and you're not a teenager, then you know what? That's ok."

Correction: A previous version of this story said the course is recognised by the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners. A spokesperson for the professional body says this is not a College-endorsed course.

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