There has been much angst about medicinal cannabis, Australia’s real-world experiment in bypassing the usual safeguards applied to prescription drugs. 

But when it comes to sorting it out, you would be forgiven for thinking that none of the regulators watching the mess have done much apart from waiting for the AHPRA notifications to roll in.

The TGA’s special access pathways were designed to ensure that treatments of last resort can be used for patients with few other options apart from death.

So, it has gone badly wrong if over a six-month period last year, they were used to initiate the highest-THC-strength medicinal cannabis products for 441,000 patients.