The Australian government legalised medicinal cannabis in 2016 under the Special Access Scheme and Authorised Prescriber Scheme. Uptake was initially very slow until 2019, when the appearance of commercial medicinal cannabis providers saw a dramatic increase in the number of approvals and prescriptions. In this one-hour seminar, using data from the Cannabis As Medicine Survey (CAMS), Dr Llew Mills discussed how the patterns of use and experiences of Australian medicinal cannabis users have changed, and the potential flaws in the current system.

About the speaker: Dr Llew Mills is a postdoctoral researcher in the Discipline of Addiction Medicine program at the University of Sydney. He works in the research team at the Langton Centre, a South Eastern Sydney Local Health District drug and alcohol treatment and research centre. He was awarded his PhD in experimental psychology in 2018. Llew is interested in cannabis dependence both in a clinical and medicinal context, and in finding ways to use routinely collected drug and alcohol data to improve drug and alcohol treatment. He has worked on the biennial CAMS since 2018 and is the chief investigator of CAMS-2022.