The Wales Green Party has called for the legalization of cannabis for medical purposes.

Party leader Pippa Bartolotti will make repeat the call when she speaks at an event in the Large Shandon Lecture Theatre at Cardiff University on Thursday entitled ‘Medical Cannabis: Update 2015’.

Bartolotti will be joining a strong line-up of experts including; Nicolas R. Wagener - a former Police Inspector, Farid Ghehioueche - a Senior Drug Policy Advocate at UN & EU Level, Dr Beth Fisher - an educator in Senior Medical Cannabis, Sarah Godfrey – a terminal Crohns disease survivor and trustee for Hemp Works Charity UK & Prof Val Curran – Pyschopharmacology – UCL.

The party has long advocated a change in the current cannabis laws and claims that the attitude of successive UK Governments has been “archaic almost medieval towards a medicinal plant that has been scientifically and clinically proven to have numerous and impressive health benefits”.

The party has called on the next UK government to follow other European countries and US states in decriminalising the Class B drug.

Ms Bartolotti said: “It is time to separate out the use of cannabis from hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine.

“No one has yet died from using cannabis, in fact the health benefits of cannabis in the treatment of epilepsy and cancer are already well documented.

“Commercial organisations in the UK are already allowed to patent and sell cannabis extracts, whilst the population as a whole is criminalised for using it – even if it saves their life. This simply has to be changed.”

Cannabis has been legalised for recreational use in four states in the US with a further 27 and the District of Columbia legalising medical marijuana or decriminalising marijuana possession.

“Cannabis has been wrongly labelled as a gateway drug,” said Ms Bartolotti. “It is not.

“It is the criminalisation of it which is the gateway to harder drugs.

“If we remove cannabis from the black market there will be many benefits for society – not least in taxation.

“In Colorado, one of the states where the commercial sale of cannabis is now legal, the state collected $700 million in taxes in 2014 alone.

“In a time of austerity and in a country like the UK where a recent survey showed that nearly one in three adults has taken some kind of illegal substance it doesn’t take a genius to work out that the legalisation of cannabis in the right framework would benefit the country hugely financially”