A woman who wants to use medicinal cannabis to treat her daughter’s epilepsy has said she will camp outside the Dáil until she gets to meet Minister for Health Simon Harris.
Vera Twomey from Cork was stopped at Dublin airport last month when customs officers seized the prescription drugs she had bought in Barcelona to help her seven-year-old daughter Ava, who has a severe form of epilepsy.
“We plan to camp outside the Dáil tonight and stay there until we get to meet Simon Harris,” Ms Twomey said on Wednesday.
“They have seized medication at Dublin airport from us…I have a prescription for that medication and I want it back.”
Ms Twomey has previously met Mr Harris, who recently approved an programme offering limited access to cannabis which will cover resistant MS, intractable nausea and vomiting associated with chemotherapy and severe epilepsy, but not chronic pain.
Ms Twomey was supported at a press conference by People Before Profit TDs Richard Boyd-Barrett and Gino Kenny, who has put forward the Cannabis for Medical Use Regulation Bill.
Also present was Dr Cathal O’Suilliobhain, who said cannabis could be used to treat chronic pain in some circumstances.
“There’s no reason why a properly trained GP can’t prescribe medicinal cannabis. It’s done all the time now in countries like Canada and the US,” Dr O’Suilliobhain said.
“As General Practitioners we prescribe quite dangerous medication. We prescribe opiates such as morphine and codeine and that sort of stuff. Cannabis is a much less dangerous compound.”
Dr Peadar O’Grady, a child psychiatrist who advises People Before Profit on health policy, said the first doctor to recommend and introduce cannabis in modern medicine was the Irish physician William Brooke O’Shaughnessy.
He said patients who needed them should be able to access “reliable, safe, good quality” cannabis products.
Dr O’Grady said experience abroad showed that when cannabis for medicinal use was introduced, sales of painkillers and muscle relaxants fell.
“With the falling sales fall lethal overdoses,” he said.
“Nobody has ever died of a drug overdose from cannabis in the history of the thousands of years of its human use.”
