Report: 2 dozen doctors recommended 34,000 Arizona medical marijuana cards
From the article:
The study released Thursday by the Arizona Department of Health Services finds these 24 doctors, most of them naturopaths, wrote close to two-thirds of all the recommendations in the most recent fiscal year.
State Health Director Will Humble said his agency has reported 30 of these doctors to their state licensing boards.
But Humble said those 30 were doctors where there was clear evidence they were not following laws which require them to check a web site run by the Arizona Board of Pharmacy to see whether their patients had prescriptions for other drugs. He does not know whether the boards ever followed up
Anyway, Humble said he has no independent authority to investigate whether the doctors writing the lion’s share of the recommendations are in fact complying with requirements that they adequately examine patients to ensure that marijuana is appropriate.
“The way the law’s written, it doesn’t matter how many you sign,” he said. And Humble said that the ability of his own agency to determine whether a doctor is engaging in unprofessional conduct “is pretty limited.”
The voter-approved law requires a “full assessment” of the patient’s medical history and condition. It also mandates there be a “bona fide physician-patient relationship.”
But the law does not define exactly what that means.
Humble said that simply writing a lot of recommendations — the precursor to getting that state-issued card — does not necessarily mean a doctor is breaking the law.
Filed under: General Problems
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