Claire

Well, let's get into it a little bit about like some of your experiences with consuming cannabis or, you know, growing up in an environment where Cannabis has always been illegal and only just recently have we gained access to medicinal cannabis, but we still live amongst a society where cannabis is criminalized and it impacts our most vulnerable realistically when it comes to that criminalization.

So I would love to hear about your experiences of if you're happy to talk about it, just some of your thoughts about, you know, what do you think about the current state of play and how would you like to see the conversation change? I

think there's been some really positive shifts forward, especially with the work that you and your party have been doing in Victoria in the last couple of years.

When I sort of think about when I was, say, 15, 16, I had a partner and they would sort of sell cannabis.

And reflecting on that in preparation for chatting with you today, I was just sort of thinking that my life could have gone a very different direction.

Surely, yeah.

And

now that we're having different, more evidence-informed conversations, I think that that will be the case for a lot of people, if not already but in the future, that interactions with the criminal legal system don't have to be as traumatic or drawn out or affect their lives in so many different ways because we have better processes in place.

to manage the reasons why people might be using cannabis.

And I think too, like reflecting on that experience, you know, that's fairly risky to be involved with someone who is, you know, potentially putting you at risk at that age as well.

And reflecting on the fact that, you know, cannabis is criminalized and that's where most people still access cannabis is through a drug dealer.

And is that the safest way to access? Most definitely not.

No, definitely

not.

And 15 or so years ago, I was working in a drug and alcohol detox.

And at that time, we would have individuals who would have experienced extreme mental distress after using synthetic cannabis.

And so having more regulations, and as we were sort of saying before, more information can help people so that they're not damaging their futures.

Yeah, and it's interesting to see, you know, the reason synthetic cannabis came about from my understanding of it was that during sort of the mining booms, particularly in WA, there was a lot of FIFO workers flying in, flying out.

There's a huge drinking culture there and there's also drug testing.

So if you were a cannabis consumer and you preferred to use cannabis over alcohol, you you ran the risk of being drug tested and you would lose your job.

So synthetic cannabinoids came onto the market because of that.

And I think the products that were created, obviously being synthetic, were nowhere, anywhere like what cannabis is in real life.

And when you start to then, you've got legislators who are trying to ban these products, but they were banning them individually line by line of what the compounds were that made up these products.

products that chemists would just alter them.

Those that were in the trade of making these particular products would alter them so that they would still circumvent the law.