How Australia's weed laws are changing
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This podcast is sponsored by the team at Spec Savers. Ready?
And good morning! This is the daily Oz. This is the Daily Oz.
This is the Daily Oz.
Oh. Now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily Oz. It's Monday, the 21st of September. I'm Elliot Lurie.
I'm Zara Seidler.
Right now, it's completely legal to smoke a joint at home if you live in Australia's capital city. Travel twenty minutes across the border into New South Wales and you could be looking at a court date. Across the country, three different governments are moving in three different directions on cannabis, with one easing the rules for patients, one pushing for a public vote on legalization, and one cracking down harder than ever.
We don't want to treat people
who are legally and responsibly taking cannabis as if they're criminals. Today we're mapping out exactly where Australia's drug laws stand and why it all comes down to your postcode.
Certainly the first time we've started a podcast with it's completely legal to smoke a joint.
I thought you'd like that one.
Um, and this podcast uh that you sent me is also named four twenty blaze it. So I that's not all I'm going off.
We're very mature at the Daily. We are very mature.
But look, it's a serious topic, so we're gonna deal with it seriously.
Why is it legal to smoke a joint at home in the ACT but not in neighboring New South Wales?
So from the beginning, a why are we talking about cannabis and marijuana and what actually is it?
Yeah, I mean we're talking about it because there was a bunch of reforms made last week by various state governments, sort of to do with the consumption of weed in Australia. Yeah. For the inundated. Uh weed is sort of the street name for cannabis, which is a plant, cannabis sativa, and it contains over a hundred active compounds, which are called cannabinoids. Now, the two that you would be most familiar with are called THC, which is the psychoactive which makes people get high, and then CBD, which doesn't have the same effect, but it is used more for um treatment around pain or sleep. Sleep and anxiety. Now, people use it in a few main ways. As we set up top, the dried flour can be smoked, it can be vaped, it can be taken through an edible gummy, but then also consumed in a bunch of other different ways as well.
Now, something interesting that I found out when I was doing the research on this is that we actually have one of the highest cannabis prevalence rates in the world, despite the fact that it's not legalized across most of the country. across most of the country.
Shocking to me.
Yes, I know. Data from the government shows us that in twenty twenty three, forty one percent of Australians reported that they had smoked cannabis at some point in their life and that eleven point five percent had used it in the past twelve months. So we're talking one in ten people in the past year.
Well, but just to be clear so that we're not misleading any listeners here, it's not like it is recreationally legal to smoke weed across the country.
No, that's right. It is in one place, which is the ACT.
Yeah.
As I mentioned up the top, you can smoke a joint in Canberra in your house. You can't do it out in a park or anything like that. It has to be on a private property. And adults there can carry up to fifty grams of dried cannabis and they can grow two plants or up to four plants per household. Okay.
So is it just growing the it themselves? Can they go into a store and buy it without like a prescription?
No. So it's still completely illegal. So you can't sell it or buy it unless you have a prescription, as all of just said. Uh but you can grow it for yourself and you can use it for yourself in the ACT.
Right. So if you if you're good at growing Have some options there in Canberra. Yeah, green
thumb.
Yeah. In
more ways than one.
Let's end the podcast. It's never getting better than that. Okay, and you said just before in answer to Olla's question about the medicinal use. So that's obviously different from recreational use. Recreational meaning getting high, medicinal meaning a medicinal property. Where is that legal?
So that's across the country. In every state and jurisdiction, you can access medicinal weed that was brought in through federal laws in 2016.
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