Photo: THC Photos via Flickr
More than two-thirds of states (plus the District of Columbia and several territories) have legalized marijuana for medical or recreational use.
But when it comes to its use by older adults, there are just as many questions as answers. Continue reading
Photo by Phil Galewitz
Legalizing marijuana in Colorado has been a boon not just to people who want to use marijuana recreationally, but also to medical researchers who want to study its effects.
The state public health department wants to channel tax revenues from marijuana sales into human research trials — permitted by the new law — and plans to ask the state legislature for authority to spend $10 million on these studies. Continue reading
Once again, the the Redding Record Searchlight’s Ryan Sabalow has used his distance from the clinic booms in Southern California and the Bay Area to tackle the the state’s medical marijuana issues with clarity and context.
It’s because Sabalow knows all four clinics, as well as local law enforcement and other authories, in his mid-size Northern California town that he’s able to illuminate issues such as traveling clinics and, most recently, the ambiguous regulations that seem to allow physician assistants to examine patients looking for marijuana recommendations as long as they’re “overseen” by a physician, one who may live hundreds of miles away.
Photo by Troy Holden via Flickr.420 Med Consultations, the PA-staffed clinic in Redding, competes on price (it’s $120 for a recommendation, while the others are in the $149 to $200 range), and has recommendations endorsed remotely by doctors in other parts of the state. An apparently related Craigslist posting invited patients to “COME GET LEGAL!” and announces that “We will renew for any Doctor!! With 24/7 Verification!!”
State physician assistant regulators say that a licensed doctor must personally examine each patient before issuing a “recommendation” that they be allowed to use medical marijuana, but the law itself is ambiguous. By being examined by an assistant, patients just might be at risk of their recommendation being considered invalid at some point down the road. The LA doctor who owns the Redding clinic, Dr. Xueren Zhao, says his operation is “100 percent legal.”
He said that in traditional medical clinics, doctors can review a patient’s chart and make a treatment determination based on an evaluation by a physician assistant.
… each patient’s chart is reviewed by a physician and that the patient’s recommendation would be revoked and their money refunded if the doctor found anything wrong, Zhao said.
The Redding Record Searchlight‘s Ryan Sabalow paints a classic tale of the principled old guard taking a stand against exploitative, profit-hungry carpetbaggers, one that just happens to take place in the wild west of northern California’s medical marijuana clinics. Since last year’s federal directive effectively allowed the state’s clinics to operate with impunity, a number of traveling physicians have come up from the south to open clinics in this northern outdoor recreation hub which more than 100,000 residents call home.
At $150 for each brief exam (no tricky medical procedures involved), the granting of medical marijuana recommendations is low-overhead work that holds the promise of substantial profit. A physician would need to see just 30 patients a day to gross more than $1 million a year, Sabalow writes. One local Redding doctor (the only one who specializes in pot, really) has found that the newcomers seem to care more about money than medicine.
[Dr. Terrence Malee] gave the example of a cage fighter who came in to his office trying to intimidate him into getting a recommendation that allowed him to have 7 ounces of marijuana in a week, when most patients are only recommended 2.
“I said, ‘Look, bud, the last time you went to the doctor and asked him for 1,000 Vicodin, did he give it to you? No. Well, I’m not going to give you 7 ounces either,” Malee said, laughing.
In a companion piece, Sabalow looks beyond California’s borders, thanks in part to the responses of other AHCJ members via our electronic discussion list. In particular, he looks at Montana, where traveling “cannabis caravans” have swelled the ranks of medicinal marijuana users in every corner of the state and Colorado, where five doctors accounted for over half of the state’s medical marijuana recommendations.
The Record Searchlight‘s editorial board followed up with an piece that questions the wisdom of making medicinal marijuana so easy to obtain.
But it’s hard not to see a stretching of the state’s groundbreaking 1996 Compassionate Use Act beyond all recognition when patients arrive not thanks to a referral from their family doctor, but after hearing a 30-second ad on the local rock station.
For more on Colorado’s effort to reign in physicians who recommend medical marijuana, see Eric Whitney’s piece for Colorado Public Radio.
Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has released his latest dispatch from medical marijuana’s front lines.
This time, Lopez checks in with a physician who specializes in herbal medicine, worked as a model to help pay her bills to attend a Caribbean medical school, wears high heels and a lab coat in her ornate gold-and-maroon office, and writes about 15 medical marijuana recommendations a day.
“I guarantee a 100% refund if you do not qualify for a medical marijuana recommendation,” she announces on her Web site, Doc420.com. The really crazy part about Dr. Sona Patel? Unlike some of her peers, she spends about half an hour on each appointment and actually turns down some of her patients’ requests.
In two earlier columns, Lopez tells the story of how he got a recommendation to purchase medical marijuana after a brief visit to a gynecologist and how he then used that recommendation to join a cooperative and legally purchase marijuana.
