Medical pot producers trying hard to woo MDs
OTTAWA — Representatives for licensed medical marijuana companies are being sent to doctors’ offices as part of a push to get hesitant physicians to prescribe the drug more often.
It’s a development that has dismayed Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti, the president of the Canadian Medical Association, who says that a largely unproven treatment is now being thrust upon doctors, putting them into potential confrontations with patients looking to score drugs and vendors looking to peddle them.
“I’m actually quite frightened,” he said.
Francescutti said some of Canada’s 13 licensed marijuana producers are operating in the same way pharmaceutical companies do.
“They’ve got product they have to move. So they’ve hired the best advertising firms,” he said. “Now, they’ve got very professional, well-dressed men and women knocking on doctors’ offices.”
That’s a problem for Francescutti, at least in part, because he doesn’t think medical marijuana has been put through stringent enough testing.
“There would have to be a clinical trial for its effect on depression, for its effect on joint pain. You’d have to have probably a thousand trials that would have to be repeated,” he said. “If marijuana is so magical, then how come the trials aren’t out there?”
“If marijuana is so magical, then how come the trials aren’t out there?” Dr. Louis Hugo Francescutti
Fracescutti acknowledged that one of the reasons those trials may not have been done previously could have been a lack of funding: “That could be part of it.”
Tweed, Canada’s first publicly traded medical marijuana producer, has hired three “academic detailers” to visit doctors’ offices.
Mark Zekulin, executive vice-president of the Smiths Falls, Ont.-based company, said they are “out there hitting the pavement, introducing who we are.”
He said doctors get a lot of visits from pharmaceutical companies, but “we’re a little different.” He said most doctors are receptive and interested in learning more.
Tweed’s director of business and medical development, Chris Murray, said there is a lot of apprehension from doctors in terms of the “hard sell from pharma reps.”
“We are not out there putting a hard sell on medical marijuana,” said Zekulin. “There is information out there, and we’re not making it up. It’s to make doctors aware of that information. How they want to integrate it into their practice is up to them.”
However, Dr. Alykhan Abdulla, president of the Academy of Medicine Ottawa, said he believes more than 90 per cent of physicians would be hesitant to prescribe medical marijuana.
“The average family doctor has never learned how to prescribe medical marijuana. It’s not taught in medical school,” said Abdulla, who said he has prescribed the herb. He said companies are not only sending representatives to lobby doctors but also making calls, writing emails and sending faxes.