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April 16, 2026 — 5:00am
Australia’s medicinal cannabis industry has grown too fast for the good of its own users. The industry’s bullishness has been curtailed after commercially driven high-volume prescribing turned patient wellbeing into a secondary consideration.
The Herald’s Angus Thomson reveals a new report by the Penington Institute, a harm-reduction research centre, showed medicinal cannabis sales fell nearly 30 per cent to 2.65 million units in the six months after July last year, when the watchdog put doctors prescribing large amounts of cannabis on notice over what it described as poor prescribing practices.
Doctors need to obtain permission from the Therapeutic Goods Administration to prescribe medicinal cannabis.
When Australia first approved cannabis for medical use in 2016, the doctor-patient relationship was widely sacrosanct. But in the years since, a booming telehealth industry grew – particularly as a result of the growth in remote consultations during COVID. Hundreds of online clinics materialised during the pandemic, allowing doctors to prescribe and sell the drug without patients leaving their homes. Many of these were linked to pharmacies selling a particular brand of cannabis product. Direct‐to‐consumer advertising mushroomed, too.
As the Herald reported, clinics, doctors and qualified nurse practitioners were issuing dozens of scripts a day. Psychiatrists were alarmed about increasing cases of cannabis-induced psychosis in emergency departments.
The watchdog’s crackdown included new rules that GPs and nurses could only prescribe cannabis products after they had identified a therapeutic need and conducted a thorough assessment of a patient’s medical history and other medicines.
Business had been clearly booming, but all along there were questions about whether the system that was set up to help patients was instead being used as a cynical money-making exercise and a defacto recreational market.
This is the first significant decline in medicinal cannabis sales recorded in Australia under the existing framework. The drop represents something of a massive turnaround. It raises serious concerns about the initial design of the system, and whether there were enough checks in place to protect consumers from an industry that expanded too rapidly.
The medical research into the therapeutic benefits of cannabis remains limited, even a decade after its approval for medical use. The TGA has approved only two cannabis products – one to treat symptoms of multiple sclerosis and the other to treat rare forms of epilepsy.
All other medicinal cannabis products are prescribed through special-access pathways enabling doctors to write scripts for “unapproved” medicines, meaning they have not been assessed by the TGA for efficacy, quality or safety.
The Penington Institute urges regulators to protect patients by maintaining rigorous enforcement of existing regulations and ensure access to medicinal cannabis for people who benefit from this medicine.
The medical cannabis industry’s growth is a cautionary tale in how good intentions can result in unforeseen problems, and how regulations designed to tackle one issue (easing symptoms with therapeutic cannabis) can collide with regulations tackling another (facilitating access to doctors during a pandemic) to create another set of problems.
There was always going to be a risk that this system might be exploited by people who wanted to use cannabis recreationally, and that savvy businesses would take advantage of any gap in the regulations. It may be too late to restore the original intention of this policy, but these alarms were being sounded several years ago, and there was an opportunity to act earlier.
The medicinal cannabis industry is a lesson in the need for careful regulation and swift action when those regulations begin to fail.
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