mjbarratt

Hi everyone. I've just posted the interim findings here. Thanks for all your help!

Hi everyone We have just released findings from the global growers survey, using the dataset we have. See below media release. If you haven't yet completed the survey, we'd love to hear from you (note if you completed it from September last year, then there's no need to do it again!, but we'd most appreciate if you could share it with any growers who might not be aware of it.) As always all comments warmly welcomed. Thanks for your ongoing support! Cheers Monica

Thanks so much. We appreciate your input into the design last year. We wonder if there are any people or organisations you can recommend that we connect with to promote the survey. We've mentioned it to the Hemp Embassy. I'm sure there's a few more people we can connect with! Facebook advertising is potentially not the way to go to promote this survey, as Facebook is very particular about cannabis advertising.

Hello everyone at Oz Stoners We have finally launched our survey. You can see our updated website here and go straight to the Australian survey here. The Oz Stoner community has contributed both to the 1st survey (2012) and this follow-up one (2020) - both helping to pilot the questionnaire and participating. We are interested in seeing what may have changed between 2012 and 2020 in terms of cultivation: how people grow, reasons for growing, policy changes, as well as how COVID-19 restrictions have affected your cultivation, if they have at all! Also, as always, we are very interested in your feedback. Please put your feedback right in this thread! At this point we can't change the survey, but we can still take further feedback on board to help us in interpreting the data later. With thanks! Monica and the GCCRC

Thanks a lot pug1010 - these are really helpful comments. I will take them back to the team and see if we can tighten up a few things to make this work better! Anyone else want to have a go? I need to get comments to the investigators by 19th December, so any time in the next week would be sweet!

Thanks a lot - most appreciated! Will definitely take those comments back to the team.

Hi everyone! Thanks for all of your feedback on this survey earlier this year. The survey is now ready to be piloted online, so if anyone wants to check it out and tell us what you think, we'd really appreciate it. Instructions are below: Go to https://curtin.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/preview/SV_8BodMskjrEouvid?&CountryURL=australia Please answer questions honestly for yourself, complete the whole survey and remember to press submit at the end. Please screenshot any problems and make notes about the problem, see below: For problem items: Question unclear / confusing / difficult to read (if yes, tell us which item and what was unclear/confusing) Unable to find a response option that fits my experience (if yes, which item and what response options didn't fit for you) Question made me uncomfortable / suspicious (if yes, which item and in what way) Other (please specify) More generally: Was the length of survey ok? Would you recommend it to your friends/network?Feel free to post any feedback/screenshots etc to this thread. Thanks a lot for checking this out and helping make it a better survey for everyone. We look forward to launching it in 2020, where it will be translated into multiple languages and promoted in many other countries! Cheers Monica

Hi everyone - I just found out about this inquiry. My colleague Kate Seear wrote the below email letting me know about it, which I'm sharing with you all here, as many of you may have experiences you want to share with the committee: Hi all, As you might have heard the Commonwealth Senate is holding an inquiry, just announced, into access to medicinal cannabis. This is a growing and very important issue, in my view. I'm writing to bring it to your attention, because I believe you may work on issues that are relevant or related, to encourage you to tell others who might be interested in these issues and encourage you or your organisations to make a submission if you can. The terms of reference are here: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Medicinalcannabis Submissions are due by 17th January 2020. By way of background and for any who are not familiar, in recent years, cannabis has begun to be legalised for medicinal purposes across Australia. This change has come about in part because of emerging evidence detailing the benefits of medicinal cannabis for certain medical conditions. It may be of benefit for people living with conditions (such as arthritis and intractable seizures), ease the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and it may even shrink cancerous tumours. Research is being done on these issues around the world, including at the Lambert Initiative (LI) at Sydney University. The LI was established by a wealthy family a few years ago, after their granddaughter was diagnosed with a serious medical condition (Dravert syndrome) that led to frequent, catastrophic, life threatening seizures. The Lamberts' son gave the granddaughter medicinal cannabis and the effects were seemingly miraculous, but the son was prosecuted. Evidently the grandparents felt this was a grave injustice, and this sparked their transformational donation. The LI seeks to establish proof of the benefits of medicinal cannabis so that it might become more readily available across Australia. Medicinal cannabis is available in Victoria, but subject to a strict access scheme. Doctors can prescribe it, but under certain conditions. Importantly, however, the cost of medication is seemingly prohibitive for all but a few members of the community, meaning that although it is technically accessible it is practically not. This has resulted in some people deciding to cultivate their own medicinal cannabis, or to supply it to others on ‘compassionate’ grounds. Several individuals have been prosecuted for this, including parents, friends, carers and doctors. Recent high profile cases including the prosecution and sentencing of South Australian woman Jenny Hallam in November 2019 and the prosecution of Dr Andrew Katelaris in NSW in 2018. Katelaris represented himself and was acquitted. There are some cases I am aware of with individuals with cancer (including late stage) also being prosecuted. On 14 November 2019, the Commonwealth Senate agreed to hold an urgent inquiry into access to medicinal cannabis in Australia, seemingly recognising that access issues were associated with some people breaking the law. If you are interested, I hope you might consider making a submission. Kind regards Kate

Hi everyone - I'm going to also post this in the politics and activism subforum, but thought I'd also add it in here - it's an invitation to make a public submission to a federal inquiry into accessing medicinal cannabis. My colleague Kate Seear wrote the below email letting me know about it, which I'm sharing with you all here, as many of you may have experiences you want to share with the committee: Hi all, As you might have heard the Commonwealth Senate is holding an inquiry, just announced, into access to medicinal cannabis. This is a growing and very important issue, in my view. I'm writing to bring it to your attention, because I believe you may work on issues that are relevant or related, to encourage you to tell others who might be interested in these issues and encourage you or your organisations to make a submission if you can. The terms of reference are here: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/Medicinalcannabis Submissions are due by 17th January 2020. By way of background and for any who are not familiar, in recent years, cannabis has begun to be legalised for medicinal purposes across Australia. This change has come about in part because of emerging evidence detailing the benefits of medicinal cannabis for certain medical conditions. It may be of benefit for people living with conditions (such as arthritis and intractable seizures), ease the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and it may even shrink cancerous tumours. Research is being done on these issues around the world, including at the Lambert Initiative (LI) at Sydney University. The LI was established by a wealthy family a few years ago, after their granddaughter was diagnosed with a serious medical condition (Dravert syndrome) that led to frequent, catastrophic, life threatening seizures. The Lamberts' son gave the granddaughter medicinal cannabis and the effects were seemingly miraculous, but the son was prosecuted. Evidently the grandparents felt this was a grave injustice, and this sparked their transformational donation. The LI seeks to establish proof of the benefits of medicinal cannabis so that it might become more readily available across Australia. Medicinal cannabis is available in Victoria, but subject to a strict access scheme. Doctors can prescribe it, but under certain conditions. Importantly, however, the cost of medication is seemingly prohibitive for all but a few members of the community, meaning that although it is technically accessible it is practically not. This has resulted in some people deciding to cultivate their own medicinal cannabis, or to supply it to others on ‘compassionate’ grounds. Several individuals have been prosecuted for this, including parents, friends, carers and doctors. Recent high profile cases including the prosecution and sentencing of South Australian woman Jenny Hallam in November 2019 and the prosecution of Dr Andrew Katelaris in NSW in 2018. Katelaris represented himself and was acquitted. There are some cases I am aware of with individuals with cancer (including late stage) also being prosecuted. On 14 November 2019, the Commonwealth Senate agreed to hold an urgent inquiry into access to medicinal cannabis in Australia, seemingly recognising that access issues were associated with some people breaking the law. If you are interested, I hope you might consider making a submission. Kind regards Kate

Thanks for your feedback everyone. I'm going to take this thread to the group for the meeting. And in a few months we will be back with a proper online survey version!

Thank you both. I guess the follow up question - more broadly - is: Do you think there's been any major changes in growing techniques or growing practices since the last survey in 2012? Are there things people are doing differently? We are aware of some of the policy changes globally (and to some extent in Australia - e.g. the changes in how we discuss medical cannabis) but I don't have my head around cultivation changes in that time. Which this survey should help us find out more about with - through the modules on growing patterns!

Thanks a lot for the feedback - yes this is exactly what would be helpful. Details are great. All feedback from all the global researchers (asking their contacts across the world) will be combined into one and discussed in a couple of weeks. Still some time for more feedback if any of you are interested in doing something like what pug1010 as done above! Cheers Monica

Yes Oz is correct. Feel free to take a look at the pdf attached to previous post and then post thoughts here in this thread. If there's response options we are missing that you would use to describe your grow methods, we are keen to hear about those. Also more broadly, if you feel like some questions are too intrusive or are written in a way which is jarring to you - that's super important feedback for us to consider and try to rectify. In a week from now I'll copy your feedback/comments from this thread and provide these to the largest group, as we will be finalising the survey later in May. It's a different context now we have countries with legal cannabis - unlike in 2012/2013!

Just realised many of you will be at Mardi Grass now and I should have been sending you this early this week. But super glad a few of you are interested. I've attached the survey here. We realise it is long (!) - this time we have a few optional modules so it may be that people can complete the 'core' and choose optional modules, or that some countries may decide to use some optional modules and not others. You may recognise a few questions - obviously we have retained some from the first round. A few of them were specifically from OzStoners feedback in the first round - e.g. garden styles etc. One note - when the survey says something like '1-10', in the web version, that will mean that there will be an option for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. If you can get comments back to me by Friday 10 May, that would be super! There's a conference happening with most of our team that we want to feed this feedback to. Please don't forward the document to others at this time - as it is in draft form. Once it is finalised and we launch it, then of course we hope you will share it widely. ICCQ2_Core and modules_piloting version_01april2019.pdf

Hi OzStoners I hope you all had a good 420 celebration! It's been a while since I've made an appearance in these forums. You may remember me from cannabis growers survey #1. We thank you all again for your support of that research. In news from me I've now got 2 kids and am almost 40 (!!) and I'm still in this drug research game. I'm actually just about to leave UNSW (National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre) and will go to RMIT, as they've offered me a permanent position in research. I've spent most of my research time lately looking at the issues of darknet market drug supplies and novel psychoactive substance use, so not as much on cannabis - but also I've been part of the 'pill testing' debate and seeing more movement in offering harm reduction services for various populations over the next period. You can see what research I've been publishing on Google Scholar - let me know if you'd like to read anything that's not open access. Our cannabis cultivation research group - you can still find us at the same website www.worldwideweed.nl - have put together another global survey. It is both to see what has changed since 2012 but also to see how things are different in those parts of the world with regulated access to cannabis. We would love to get feedback from the OzStoners again given it was so helpful last time - your feedback changed the course of the survey quite a lot at that time. Please comment below if you'd like to look at the draft survey and comment on it - and then next week I can send you it privately. By the way, OzStoners, it's no mean feat to still be operating after 20 years. As admin at Bluelight, we are also a forum that opened in 1999 and it's a different and challenging environment with the advent of so many other digital communication methods. Well done! Cheers Monica