ABC News Australia – Medicinal cannabis prescribing practices under scrutiny after scripts issued ‘every 4 minutes’… data reveals a nurse practitioner who appears to have issued 31,000 scripts over a year.!

What have i been saying for the past 3 years .. it’s about time somebody came down on them all like a ton of bricks

I get a Seek alert – to follow what they are offering people usually i can get to the job ads but now i have been blocked by seek! I presume somebody must have complained.

There are a number of US & Canadian Companies actively pushing branded product in Australia that they sell to the adult use makets in their home jurisdictions.

They need to be stopped immediately and rather than flogging in product they should forced to make large scale investments in building their businesses in Australia or look for somewhere else to flog their hight THC product. We all know the names of these companies…

The ABC

Australian medical practitioners are writing scripts for high-strength medicinal cannabis products with alarming speed, raising concerns some are putting “profit over patient safety”, according to the regulator.

Since medicinal cannabis was legalised in 2016, the industry has exploded, with cannabis telehealth clinics fuelling a rapid increase in prescriptions of products that contain THC, the psychoactive substance that causes a “high”.

More Australians are accessing medicinal cannabis in smokable flower form with THC content above 20 per cent and in some concentrated forms as high as 98 per cent THC for conditions such as insomnia, chronic pain and anxiety.

That is despite what some experts describe as “surprisingly weak” clinical trial evidence that high-strength THC products are the most suitable treatments for those conditions.

New data from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) revealed eight medical practitioners appeared to have issued more than 10,000 scripts each for the highest-THC-strength products over a six-month period.

The agency said one doctor appeared to have issued more than 17,000 scripts in six months, equivalent to a script every 4 minutes in a working day.

Using multiple data sources, AHPRA’s analysis also identified one pharmacist who dispensed 959,000 cannabis products in one year, which equates to more than 2,600 products per day — for 365 straight days.

The data also revealed a nurse practitioner who appeared to have issued 31,000 scripts over a year.

In short:

Regulators are concerned practitioners are putting profits over patient safety, with some writing more than 100 medicinal cannabis scripts a day.

An ABC investigation found some doctors saying they felt they were being treated as drug dealers, pressured to write scripts and paid contingent on scripts being provided during consultations.