I think it's less about standing up to industry pressure than...

I think it's less about standing up to industry pressure than medicine taking new data into account and adjusting its recommendations (my stepmum was recommended smoking to deal with the stress of her first pregnancy. The doctor could have had incentives from tobacco or wherever, as there are today and probably always will be, but believed to some degree that it was a reasonable course of action.

Medicine is a science and regularly updates its statistics, and it's also not an omnipotent authority that oversees doctors. There's no one course of treatment that has to be undertaken for any particular problem and doctors can each have their own opinions. In a perfect world, opium would be readily available to those who need it and not at all to those that don't, and for now restricting it to prescription is seen as the easiest and most effective solution. A lot of people with genuine need will be inconvenienced but a lot of people will be better off for not abusing what they don't need. Not fair but that's the bigger picture. Business and communities, and therefore governments too, prefer transition to disruption.

Good to see the steady move to MM progress, even if slower than we'd like. AC8 will either be the Coke or Pepsi of the Aust industry; CAN the other. Either way is fine with me.