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.
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00:00So medicinal cannabis was legalised nearly a decade ago and you might remember those
00:06moving scenes of the parents of people with terminal illness and of young children with
00:11treatment resistant epilepsy that really advocated for this change but since then there's been
00:17a huge transformation in the industry. Now when COVID sort of opened the door to telehealth
00:23prescribing we saw a huge number of medicinal cannabis telehealth clinics pop up and with
00:29that the number of prescriptions for medicinal cannabis has really skyrocketed more than doubled
00:34in the past few years. So what we're seeing now is also an increase in the strength of the products
00:41that are being prescribed to people that also has increased rapidly over the past few years and
00:47there's concerns about the quality of care that patients are getting prior to being prescribed
00:52some of these products through these single issue telehealth clinics. What's the experience for
00:58consumers? Well I've spoken to lots of patients who've told me about how simple it was for them
01:03to get a script. Rowan you just heard from had PTSD and was on a range of medications from his regular
01:10GP saw the ad called up never spoke to a doctor but suddenly had medicinal cannabis a high strength THC
01:18version at his door. Now when he took that as directed he didn't have a good experience he said
01:24his anxiety increased and he was advised by his regular GP to stop taking it. Now it's worth saying
01:30that most people you know medicinal cannabis is well tolerated but for people who have a pre-existing
01:36mental health condition or a vulnerability it can cause issues particularly if it's this high strength
01:42THC type product. So what regulators are concerned about is the level of care and oversight really that's
01:49being given to patients who are being prescribed large quantities of this high strength THC cannabis.
01:55And so with those concerns what has the regulator said? So ARPRA which is the medical practitioner
02:01regulator has done an analysis looking at the data and has found that there are huge quantities
02:06of medicinal cannabis being prescribed. They found one pharmacist prescribed oh sorry one pharmacist
02:11dispensed nearly one million products in a year so that's equivalent to 2,600 products a day without a day off.
02:17So large amounts from a small number of prescribers. They also found eight practitioners had prescribed
02:24more than 10 or had written more than 10,000 scripts in a six-month period including one that
02:30appears to have written more than 17,000. So that's equivalent to one every four minutes or less than
02:36four minutes. So the question they're really asking is how are these patients being assessed properly
02:41um and are they being given good medical care and um you know it really is there a conflict of interest
02:47or other incentives or issues with the way that this system is currently working um that could put
02:53patients at risk because THC containing medicinal cannabis products are schedule 8 medicines so that's
02:58the same as things like opioids um and they do have the risk for addiction and harm. So it's something that
03:04the regulators really concerned about and they've started a task force that's looking at prescribing issues
03:09more generally to ensure that patients are being kept safe and these are also not first-line treatments
03:15for most of the conditions they're being prescribed for like insomnia, anxiety and chronic pain. You know
03:20there are other treatments that um seem to be more effective and the clinical trial evidence um really
03:25hasn't caught up to speed with the amount that it's being prescribed um although patients some of them
03:30seem to say that they seek they do get relief from it. Um so really at the moment the regulator is just
03:36looking at exactly um how frequently these products are being prescribed and whether doctors are really
03:41um looking after patients.