SCC President Jeffrey Hergenrather, MD, was a featured speaker at the conference in Melbourne put on by the National Institute of Integrative Medicine last weekend (May 19-20). Wife Starr distributed literature at the event. She reports:
The tabling went very well, 40 docs, including pharmacists from all over Australia and even New Zealand, signed up on the email list and 4 signed up for membership right then and there. They were all very enthusiastic about the SCC, loved Jeff and his presentations, and are extremely hungry for more information/knowledge/collabora-tion in the Cannabis as Medicine world. So! I think we did well 🙂
We are now in Canberra, the national Capitol, and Today we meet up with David Caldicott to discuss the clinicians group here and identifying the person who will manage it. We perhaps will be meeting up with some officials as well.
Next Monday we will meet with Lucy Haslam, director of United in Compassion, the organization that brought Jeff to Australia in ‘16 & ‘17, and will again in March 2019.
The public opinion on cannabis is changing rapidly due to the perseverance of a small group of physician and activists of whom we are highly regarded. The Australian federal government, though allowing cannabis as medicine, has approved only 600 patients over the first 4 years of the program, and good medicine is very hard to access and is expensive. Our role in education is certainly playing a vital part in public and physician awareness and pressure on the government to meet the patients’, physicians’ and pharmacists’ needs, as the pharmacists want to be the dispensers, as they should be!
— Starr Hergenrather
