Since 2014, lawmakers from the Philippines have been trying to get legislation on medical cannabis passed in Congress and have re-introduced it in the current 18th Congress, with little success so far. The main roadblock is President Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial anti-drug policy – popularly called the ‘war on drugs’ – which has attracted criticism from human rights advocates because of the rising number of extra-judicial killings.
In 2017, newspapers quoted Duterte’s spokesman that the former was open to approving bills legalizing medical cannabis. This probably inspired the approval on the third and final reading of House Bill (HB) No. 6517 (Philippine Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act). Unfortunately, this was blocked by the Senate in 2019 when Duterte changed his tune and declared the opposite in a campaign rally in Negros Occidental. Two house bills pending in Congress on cannabis are HB 6517, re-introduced as HB 279, and HB 3961.
Both are before the house committee on health for approval. HB 3961, introduced in 2020 by Congressman Luis Raymund Villafuerte, aims at legalizing the local production and export of medical cannabis to make it more accessible and cheaper for Filipinos. It also hopes to take advantage of the growing multi-billion dollar industry citing that Singapore, China, and Thailand – which already have very strict narcotics law – as producers of medical cannabis or are about to do it, particularly, in the light of the UN Commission on Narcotics Drugs decision in late 2020 to remove from its list of most dangerous drugs, cannabidiol (CBD), a non-addictive and non-psychoactive component of the cannabis plant.
So far, the DDB and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved the use of CBD for patients afflicted with epilepsy, such as the oral solution Epidiolex for treatment of seizures associated with severe forms of epilepsy. The DDB, however, also admits that parents have complained that medicine containing the cannabis product costs around $25,000 to $30,000 for a one-year prescription, which is quite burdensome.
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