The Program That Only Existed Because a Lot of Companies Said Yes for Free

Lucy Haslam's son Dan spent the last years of his life fighting bowel cancer, and cannabis was the one thing that gave him real relief from the chemo. On his deathbed, he asked his mother to keep fighting until every patient who needed access could get it. She's spent the years since doing exactly that — lobbying government, founding United in Compassion, then co-founding the Australian Medicinal Cannabis Association (AMCA) and chairing its board. Medicinal cannabis being legal in Australia at all traces back to that fight.

In November 2022, a group of AMCA board directors and ambassadors met with the federal health minister to ask for seed funding to get a national compassionate access scheme, Compass, off the ground — free or subsidised medicinal cannabis for patients who couldn't afford it, including people who were dying and children with intractable epilepsy. The meeting went well enough that they were encouraged. Then the May 2023 budget came out, and the funding wasn't in it. AMCA received a formal letter declining the request.

That's the part of this story I think matters most, because it's the reason everything that came after had to be paid for by an industry that was barely three years past legalisation itself, with no government money behind it at all.

The meeting on our side

We were in contact with Lucy around that time, and once it was clear government funding wasn't coming, I suggested Cannabis Warehouse lead the scheme instead — run it as the national distributor, fund it out of our own pocket, and bring other brands on board to donate supply, since nobody else was going to pay for it. Everyone in the room got behind it immediately.

What we actually put into it

We funded custom software development so the whole thing could run properly — patient and clinician registration, applications, and tracking supply. We became the scheme's distributor, which meant every clinician who wanted to register a patient went through us, and every unit of donated stock moved through our operation to reach them. We did this without taking any margin on it — not a discount on our usual approach, but genuinely not profiting from our involvement at all. AMCA says the same thing on their own Compass page, which matters more to me than my own account of it does.

One of our team members made Compass his top priority and drove it end to end, and the rest of our team backed him the whole way. We used our own existing relationships to bring other brands on board to donate product, and enough of them said yes that the scheme had real supply behind it from the start. We ran an initial six-month pilot before AMCA launched Compass nationally, open to any clinician and any patient who needed it.

Running the scheme as national distributor also required us to have our licensing and compliance infrastructure already in place. We'd spent considerable time working with the Office of Drug Control to get Australia's first fully electronic medicinal cannabis licence, and that groundwork is what made it operationally possible to move supply at the scale Compass needed.

Over the life of the program, more than 500 patients received free or heavily subsidised medicinal cannabis through it — people who, without this, would have gone without a medicine they needed or paid full price for one they couldn't afford.

What it actually costs to do this

I don't think this part gets talked about enough, so I want to be honest about it. Running something like Compass properly, funded entirely by the companies involved, isn't a line item you absorb without noticing. It takes operational capacity that would otherwise go toward the core business, and sometimes that capacity has to be pulled from somewhere that was already stretched. It takes a toll on morale over time, because the people driving it are doing genuinely hard, unpaid-in-margin work on top of their actual jobs, for years, without much public recognition. And it can put real pressure on cash flow, because donating product and staff time at scale is a cost with no revenue attached to offset it. None of that is a complaint. It's just true, and I think it's worth saying plainly so the next company that considers doing something like this goes in with its eyes open.

The part that's harder to say

Work like this is done in good faith, out of genuine goodwill, by people and companies who aren't looking for anything back. That's true of Compass, and it's true of every industry-funded public good program I've seen.

The honest reality is that programs built on voluntary contribution are fragile in a way that government-funded ones aren't. When the companies involved face commercial pressure, when industry bodies restructure, when priorities shift — the unpaid work is usually the first thing that gets deprioritised. Not because it wasn't valuable. Just because there's no contract holding it in place.

I think it's worth saying this plainly so the next company that considers doing something like this goes in with realistic expectations. The work is worth doing. The patients it reaches are real. But voluntary programs need structural support to survive the inevitable changes that happen in any young industry — and building that structure in from the start is something our industry still needs to get better at.

The work that went into Compass — from the companies that donated supply, to the clinicians who registered patients, to the team members who made it their priority — deserves to be remembered on its own terms. I remain proud of what was built and genuinely hope the program continues to reach the patients who need it most.