- Health Committee of the House approved an amendment to the Health Code to allow therapeutic use of marijuana.
A new step was taken by the project that proposes to modify the Health Code to incorporate and regulate the use of products derived from cannabis for therapeutic purposes, this during the last session of the Health Commission of the Chamber of Deputies.
The project, admitted in July 2017, unlike what was proposed in other initiatives that were aimed at modifying the law 20.000, addresses the issue from the Health Code, to, in substance, establish a safeguard for patients who use cannabis through a medical prescription against any investigation by the Public Ministry.
The commission endorsed the second article of the original proposal by five votes in favor and one abstention., now in practice the sole article of the initiative, which indicates that it will be that medical prescription that establishes the specific doses for each patient affected by any pathology susceptible to the use of this substance.
“The medical prescription is a protection mechanism against the violence that is exercised today against families who have to grow their medicine through self-cultivation directly and in their homes., It is a safeguard for the presumption of innocence in the face of a trial process that can continue to be carried out.”, stated the president of the commission, Deputy Karol Cariola (PC).
“An investigation does not stop with this, but quite the opposite, can continue, but without these prior procedures that detain patients, that they take away their medicine and that directly cause them tremendous moral damage because they treat them like criminals, they criminalize them, when they are patients”, the parliamentarian emphasized.
Cariola highlighted that “it's a step, wee, but that at least allows us to protect, naturalize and generate active awareness in institutions” and that “The medical prescription is a backup against any investigation by the Public Ministry to transfer the burden of proof to the Public Ministry and not to the patient., safeguarding the presumption of innocence of the patient who has been prescribed by a medical prescription the indication of medicinal cannabis in its respective uses in different pathologies that are susceptible to the use of this plant”.
In next Tuesday's session, aspects that were not established will be resolved, such as pathologies that can be treated with cannabis and that a doctor issues the prescription, but in any case the dispatch of the initiative is expected, with which it will be in a position to be discussed in the Chamber of the Chamber.
“This has occurred in a very transversal way, There is still one last vote to be able to dispatch the commission project, but the substance that has to do with the support of the medical prescription is resolved”, concluded Deputy Cariola.
