The medicinal cannabis industry has launched a new content series in partnership with streaming platform Ticker, aiming to demonstrate the medicine's place in Australia's healthcare system and the therapeutic benefit it delivers to hundreds of thousands of patients.
The series arrives as regulators continue weighing reforms following a public consultation held in late 2025, with industry figures seeking to make the case that medicinal cannabis has moved well beyond the fringes of medicine and is proving effective across a range of conditions.
The series also conveys the industry's willingness to engage collaboratively with the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) on reform, while insisting that any changes must not undermine patients' ability to access the medication they rely on.
"Our industry supports the framework review process currently underway – but we continue to recommend evolution not revolution," said Kristin Viccars, chair of Medicinal Cannabis Industry Australia (MCIA). "As the TGA considers reforms, we continue to support the regulator in ensuring that patient access is maintained through the transition to the evolved framework.
"We look forward to constructive engagement as we continue to discuss the relevant risk/benefit profiles of medicinal cannabis including deeper data, quality of life tracking, measurement and reporting.
"We firmly believe in the need to focus on outcomes and build a real-world evidence base that then becomes a strong foundation to better inform further policy in this space."
The series launches today with the first of a two-part conversation segment on Ticker News featuring Viccars, Releaf Clinics' Dr Priya Ayyar, Leura Wellness director and co-founder Dr Orit Holtzman and co-founder Martin Lane.
The TGA opened its consultation into proposed medicinal cannabis regulatory reform last August, drawing 800 responses. Health officials, who stated they held no predetermined views on what new regulations might look like, have finished reviewing the submissions, with stakeholder workshops due to begin this month. A second public consultation on potential reforms is scheduled for April.
Viccars underlined that medicinal cannabis has earned its place as a meaningful tool for healthcare providers and called on the TGA to help construct an evidence base from collected data.
"When we look at it from an efficacy point of view, there's hundreds of thousands of Australians who are now using medical cannabis so it's not a fringe therapy," he said.
"We would like to leverage the data collected by the TGA and build a national evidence database to support what we are seeing anecdotally."
Since the consultation opened, industry bodies have made their desire for a collaborative approach with the TGA on reform plainly known. While accepting – and agreeing – that some degree of reform is needed to lift quality and safety standards, they have consistently argued that patient access must not be restricted.
Viccars warned that constraining access would push patients back toward the unregulated market, where dosing is inconsistent and there is no clinical oversight.
"Genuine patients are the first to be harmed by blunt regulatory responses. If you squeeze the regulated system too hard, patients don't disappear, they just lose protection," he said.
"We also lose the ability to build the science and evidence base by the data becoming less transparent. The greatest risk isn't regulated access, it's unmanaged use without clinical oversight."
He said that rather than debating whether medicinal cannabis should exist at all, the more pressing question was how to make it "safe, evidence-based, and centred on patient outcomes".
Viccars also pointed to TGA data showing an adverse event rate of 0.06%, arguing this already demonstrated that the benefits of medicinal cannabis clearly outweigh the risks.
"When patients see quality of life improvement and relief from the use of medical cannabis under a physician's care, there's much greater benefit than risk," he said. "But we're very keen to work with the regulators to be a professional partner in applying appropriate reform to improve access and ultimately help those medical cannabis patients who are in need of the therapy."
Australian Medicinal Cannabis Association (AMCA) chair Dr Teresa Nicoletti, who will appear in the second conversation segment to be released on Monday, said the industry was firmly behind regulatory reform.
"We are very motivated and very keen to work with the regulator so that we can collaborate on the reforms that ensure access to high-quality medicinal cannabis products," she said.
"But we do need to recognise the number of patients who are taking medicinal cannabis and are deriving benefit from it and any regulatory reforms that we introduce must not compromise access."
Speaking on the first episode, Dr Ayyar told Ticker News host Ahron Young that she witnesses the impact of medicinal cannabis "every day".
"I work with so many patients day-to-day, getting them some great outcomes," she said.
"Typically, the early signs of progress and clinical benefit are better sleep, they start down titrating some of their other medications, they start becoming more functional at work and with their families. That's real-world anecdotal evidence."
- The second episode, featuring Dr Teresa Nicoletti, Dr Priya Ayyar and Professor Nicholas Lintzeris, will be published on Monday.
