Can I grow my own if I have a prescription in Queensland?

What the law actually says

Drugs Misuse Act 1986 (Qld), current as at 3 May 2024.

The offence. Section 8 makes it an offence to unlawfully produce a dangerous drug. The word does more work than it looks: 'produce' is defined in s 4 to mean "(a) prepare, manufacture, cultivate, package or produce; (b) offering to do any act specified in paragraph (a); (c) doing or offering to do any act preparatory to, in furtherance of, or for the purpose of, any act specified in paragraph (a)". Growing is cultivating, and cultivating is producing.

Note how wide limb (c) is. Acts preparatory to producing are themselves producing, so equipment and preparation can matter before a plant exists.

What 'unlawfully' means. The Act defines it as "without authorisation, justification or excuse by law". So the question is whether something else in Queensland law authorises a patient to produce.

Nothing in this Act does. The word 'prescription' appears three times in the whole Act, and all three are in s 134A about the Minister recommending the prescription of a thing as a dangerous drug — the regulation-making sense of the word, not a doctor's prescription. There is no patient exception anywhere in it.

Where the patient's authorisation actually comes from, and what it covers. Not this Act — the Medicines and Poisons Act 2019 (Qld), current as at 23 September 2025. s 34(1) makes it an offence to buy or possess an S4 or S8 medicine other than in the authorised way, and s 34(2) carves the patient out:

> “However, subsection (1) does not apply to a person to whom an S4 or S8 medicine is lawfully supplied for — (a) the person's own therapeutic treatment…”

Read the words. The exemption is for a person to whom the medicine is lawfully supplied. A plant you grew was not supplied to you by anyone, so nothing in s 34(2) reaches it. This is the same drafting shape as the Northern Territory's s 42 and Western Australia's s 7(3), arrived at independently in three jurisdictions.

And the Act does not contemplate growing at all. The word cultivate does not appear in the Medicines and Poisons Act 2019 even once. Its manufacturing offence, s 33, is about manufacture, and s 4 of the Drugs Misuse Act expressly distinguishes cultivating from manufacturing by listing both. There is no provision in the medicines legislation that a patient could point to.

Commonwealth cultivation licensing under the Narcotic Drugs Act 1967 is a commercial scheme administered by the Office of Drug Control, not a patient pathway.

What happens if it goes wrong

Maximum penalties for producing a dangerous drug, read off s 8 of the Drugs Misuse Act 1986 (Qld) as current at 3 May 2024, together with the Drugs Misuse Regulation 1987 (Qld) current at 1 July 2026, which supplies the schedules s 8 refers to.

Cannabis is a Schedule 2 drug under the Regulation, and the Schedule 3 quantity for it is 500.0 g or, where the drug consists of plants weighing less than that in aggregate, 100 plants. So:

• At or above that quantity — s 8(1)(d): 20 years imprisonment.
• Below it — s 8(1)(e): 15 years imprisonment.

Those are the maxima for the offence, not the sentences ordinarily imposed for a small domestic grow, and s 8(3) notes a further circumstance of aggravation under s 161Q of the Penalties and Sentences Act 1992. The reason for stating them is narrower than sentencing outcomes: producing cannabis in Queensland is a crime under s 8, not a summary offence, at any quantity.

Possessing an S8 medicine outside the s 34(2) carve-out is a much smaller matter — a maximum of 200 penalty units under s 34(1) of the Medicines and Poisons Act 2019. The gap between those two numbers is the whole point of this page.