The medicinal cannabis business is “booming”, with Australian sales likely to have quadrupled in the past two years, according to a new report.
The annual Cannabis in Australia report released by the Penington Institute, a research organisation that promotes harm reduction approaches to drug use, shows the money Australians are spending on medicinal cannabis products is on track to reach $1bn by the end of the year.
The Penington Institute obtained the sales data provided by companies to the drugs regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, on a six-monthly basis.
The data showed the total number of units sold in the first half of 2024 reached 2.87m, “up considerably” from the 1.68m units that were sold in the second half of 2023, the report said.
Using pricing data from health and wellness website honahlee, the authors estimated Australians spent $234m on medicinal cannabis products in 2022, rising to $448m in 2023, and $402m in just the first six months of 2024.
John Ryan, the chief executive of the Penington Institute, said “we’re expecting that by the end of this year it will have reached a billion, which is more than quadrupling the 2022 numbers”.
Medicinal cannabis products are not included in the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods, with the exception of two products, but regulated access schemes were established in 2016.
Ryan said the products had a slow and restricted start but have become more accessible due to a number of factors, including greater public awareness, more doctors and pharmacists becoming prescribers and the telehealth “revolution”.
Prof Wayne Hall, from the National Centre for Research on Youth Substance Use Research at the University of Queensland, said he believed the “extraordinary growth” indicated Australia would follow a trajectory seen in Canada and the US.
“When you create a medical cannabis program … the pressure is often brought to bear to expand it so it merges into a de facto legal cannabis market for adults,” Hall said.
Hall said much of the growth is for prescriptions for products with higher levels of THC, the psychoactive component which produces the high. “If people can afford it, you can probably get more potent cannabis on prescription than you can get in the illicit market,” he said.
The report’s data showed that the overwhelming majority of medicinal cannabis was obtained through the Authorised Prescriber (AP) scheme, which allows doctors to be approved to prescribe a particular category of medicinal cannabis products without needing to seek individual approvals for each patient they treat.
The report noted there is limited information available on patient’s age, gender and conditions for which medicinal cannabis has been approved under the AP scheme. Such data is only collected and reported for approvals issued via the special access scheme, where a new approval is needed for each patient and each different category of product.
Among special access scheme prescriptions, 40% were for anxiety, and one-third were for chronic pain.
Dr Jack Wilson, a postdoctoral researcher at the Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at the University of Sydney, said it was important medicines were safe and effective for the conditions they were treating.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think that we’re seeing that here,” Wilson said, adding that medicinal cannabis is most commonly prescribed for chronic pain and anxiety disorders, despite the lack of strong evidence for it as an effective treatment for these conditions.
“It seems quite clear that the recreational use of cannabis in most of Australia is prohibited, so the medicinal market may serve as a way for some people to access cannabis products for non medicinal use.”
The report calls for the government to replace the current criminalised model with a regulated adult-use cannabis model, stating “it is shortsighted to make medicinal cannabis the sole access point for a high-demand, relatively low-harm product”.”
On Wednesday, the Greens’ bill to legalise cannabis was defeated. Senator David Shoebridge said the defeat demonstrated “Labor and the Coalition once again teaming up to vote down law reform the community wants”.
