Canadian doctors reluctant to prescribe medicinal pot
Doctors in Canada are so skittish about the medical use of marijuana that a third of MDs who have been asked to endorse a patient’s access to the drug never agree to it, a Canadian Medical Association survey suggests.
Another 25 per cent of doctors who responded said they would “seldom” be willing to support a patient’s access to medicinal pot, and 64 per cent are worried that patients who request medical marijuana may only want it to get high.
The results come as Health Canada prepares to publish proposed new regulations to its medical marijuana access program that could make doctors the sole “gatekeepers” to the drug.
The federal agency has proposed removing itself as the ultimate arbiter in approving or rejecting applications to possess pot for medical purposes. Instead, doctors alone would approve such requests.
CMA president Dr. Anna Reid says physicians are unfairly being asked to prescribe a drug without the information they need to use it appropriately, “and that’s just not acceptable for us.”
Emergency rooms and psychiatric wards across the country are seeing large numbers of young people with recurring psychosis — people who are actively hallucinating and losing touch with reality — “that is felt by researchers to be actually triggered by marijuana,” said Reid, an emergency physician from Yellowknife. She said marijuana is no longer the same drug it was when she started practising medicine 25 years ago.
“We know for a fact that marijuana is much stronger now. These are the kinds of concerns that have physicians very worried about prescribing it, when we don’t know what a safe dose is (and) we don’t know how to use it,” Reid added.
While many patients use marijuana safely, “there’s a potential huge harm to this drug,” she said.
The proposed changes to the government’s medical marijuana access program could see fewer doctors willing to prescribe it, she said.
The CMA survey was sent to more than 2,200 physicians who have agreed to be surveyed online several times a year on various issues. In all, 607 responses were received, with a response rate of 27 per cent.
It’s not a random sample, meaning “it’s not necessarily representative of the entire physician population,” Reid said. “But it’s a good snapshot of what physicians are thinking in general.”
Among the findings:
• More than half (57 per
cent) said they had insuf-
ficient information on the risks and benefits of marijuana for medical purposes.
• 42 per cent of those surveyed
said that patients “seldom” ask about using medical marijuana, while 28 per cent said they have never been asked and 27 per cent said they are “sometimes” asked. Only four per cent reported being asked “often.”
• 35 per cent of doctors
who had been asked about access said they never support such requests, “while 40 per cent would do so at least some of the time,” according to a summary posted on the CMA’s website.
• Most (66 per cent) respondents
agreed that Health Canada should offer liability protection to doctors who support a patient’s request for marijuana. (The Canadian Medical Protective Association recommends that doctors who complete the “medical declaration” also request that patients sign a liability form agreeing not to make “any claim or complaint or commence any proceedings” against the doctor in relation to their use of marijuana.)