The government of Australia has informed the police to use discretion in arresting terminally ill medical cannabis users. How generous of them to allow a terminally ill person to attempt to save their life, when no other option is available.

By no means would I label this act as compassionate!
This last ditched avenue was forced upon the governing body through public opinion and it's of our opinion, that if they could tax the situation, they would.

So this leads us to one of the main problems facing patients in need of cannabis for medicinal use,  it's still a criminal offense and "discretion" may or may not depend on what side of the bed the police officer or judge woke up on.

Where do patients obtain cannabis when they need it right now? Generally speaking, cannabis as a medicine is the last resort, so the patients in need are really in need! It takes months to grow cannabis, even in optimum circumstances and those who choose to grow are living in this grey area of "discretion".
A constant supply, as much as several kilos and of a particular strain is needed to kill cancer (anecdotally speaking) and this must seem almost impossible to someone close to death. Hence the need to deal with criminals to obtain cannabis, generally at an inflated price and really, who knows what you're getting?
Which leads to the following mathematical equation;
Inflated prices of cannabis= criminal activity=more suffering=Inflated prices of cannabis= criminal activity=more suffering, repeated.

So will this improve when the Australian government eventually have medical cannabis available for those in need? It's doubtful. Based on what we've heard from the Australian government cannabis information talks, cannabis will be extremely expensive to produce due to over zealous extreme security measures that need to be implemented and all the greedy little hands it needs to pass before arriving at it's destination, the patient.

1) First we need to pay for the government bureaucracy, monitoring of growing and producing the product, costing tax payers a fortune I'm sure.
2) Security needed for every step of the process, from seed to sale, so " not a leaf goes unaccounted " quoted from the TGA's speech.
3) Refinement costs to extract the cannabinoids, packaging, marketing, etc, the list goes on.

And at the end of the equation we end up with a product similar to Sativex, ridiculously over-priced at approximately $16,000 (US) per annum.

Which in turn will lead to either huge government subsidies, or to patients that just won't able to afford the medicine and therefore be forced once again to deal with criminals, such as those in the following article by the SMH; Two killers sentenced to jail for murder of Jacob Munro who was buried in bush grave
So Australian Government, I ask you this; Does this scientifically proven benign plant cannabis create criminals, or is it your stupid archaic laws, that are based on propaganda rather than science?

The simple and logical answer is to decriminalise cannabis nationally.