Cannabis bill ‘may be Trojan horse’

A senior HSE psychiatrist has strongly criticised a Private Members’ Bill currently going through the Oireachtas relating to medicinal cannabis, claiming “at best, it is an example of using an industrial jack-hammer to crack open a peanut and at worst it is a Trojan horse”.

Writing in today’s Irish Examiner, Dr Bobby Smyth, a lecturer in public health at Trinity College Dublin and consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist in the HSE’s Adolescent Addiction Service, said some people would benefit from access to medicinal cannabis, including MS sufferers and those with Dravet’s Syndrome.

But he said decades of research “indicate that cannabinoids is either wholly or largely ineffective for most disorders” and he referred to the increased potency of cannabis and its role as “the dominant substance causing young people to seek addiction treatment across Ireland”.