If there’s one thing we can say about the ol’ Devil’s Lettuce, it’s that complete prohibition has failed as miserably as earlier attempts to prohibit alcohol. Admit it: people enjoy getting high way too much.
That said, how is legalisation going?
Contrary to the giddy claims of the stoner lobby, legalising cannabis in the US has done nothing to remove the criminal element. In fact, it’s simply given rise to another booming black market. Just as high taxes have caused a massive (and violent) black market in tobacco, the same has happened with legal cannabis.
Decriminalisation, on the other hand, appears to have worked pretty well. But that’s another story.
While recreational cannabis – and let’s be honest, that’s what it is almost always – remains illegal in every state, there is a booming market in ‘medicinal cannabis’. Which kind of gives away the gambit of the ‘medicinal’ claims.
Firstly, the medical claims about cannabis’s benefits have always been dodgy, to say the least. The evidence has always been thin to non-existent. Controlled tests rarely show much more than placebo benefit. Most of the so-called ‘evidence’ boils down to, ‘I just totally reckon, man.’
The boom in ‘medicinal cannabis’ tells us exactly what it is: a transparent attempt to get around prohibition laws.
Patients in emergency departments with cannabis-induced psychosis, consults lasting less than a minute and doctors who have issued more than 10,000 scripts in six months are among the cases that have prompted Australia’s alarmed healthcare watchdog to announce clearer guidelines for the booming medicinal cannabis industry.
The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) on Wednesday released guidance for doctors prescribing medicinal cannabis products amid what it described as poor prescribing practice and surging patient demand.
The watchdog has been alarmed by the emergence of “vertically integrated” telehealth clinics which both prescribe and dispense cannabis products and account for the vast majority of an estimated $500 million worth of sales each year.
In other words, ‘Big Weed’ is as venal and greedy and unethical as Big Pharma.
Chief executive Jason Untersteiner said the regulator would crack down on some practitioners with high rates of prescribing, including eight people who had issued more than 10,000 scripts in six months, and one who has prescribed cannabis products more than 17,000 times.
“Some business models that have emerged in this area rely on prescribing a single product or class of drug and use online questionnaires that coach patients to say ‘the right thing’ to justify prescribing medicinal cannabis,” Untersteiner said. “This raises the very real concern that some practitioners may be putting profits over patient safety.”
This masthead last year uncovered revelations one GP wrote an average of one script every five minutes, while others at major telehealth player Montu saw an average of eight patients an hour.
Montu, you say? Yeah, about them...
The nation’s biggest medicinal cannabis company engineered a legally contentious referral scheme and set up an “independent” public lobby group as it built a dominant position in the booming industry.
The revelations about Montu, which last year pulled in almost $100 million in sales in Australia, have emerged as part of an investigation into the nation’s medicinal cannabis sector, raising serious concerns about the level of regulation, medical ethics, and risks to consumers […]
The company has developed a reputation in Australia’s medicinal cannabis industry for pushing the boundaries of health advertising laws, which insist health promotions must not “mislead or deceive” consumers “or create unrealistic expectations about products”.
After four years of warnings that the company’s advertising broke these laws, the Therapeutic Goods Administration in April commenced Federal Court action against Montu. The case returns to court on Monday.
Meanwhile, the ‘Big Weed’ execs are whooping it up every bit as shamelessly as a Pfizer CEO.
Founded in 2019 by Christopher Strauch, the company is majority-owned by his brother Raphael, via the German pair’s Kowloon-based holding company.
Raphael Strauch is heavily involved in cryptocurrency, and posts regular updates on social media showing him on private jets, on the ski field, with vintage sports cars and, this week, with a Porsche 911 in the Dakar rally.
In the five years since launching, Montu has become a $100-million-a-year company, importing cannabis and buying locally cultivated products. It also runs cannabis telehealth clinic Alternaleaf – whose medical practitioners and nurses partner with pharmacies to prescribe and dispense cannabis – along with a distribution platform, Leafio […]
Montu also operated a Medicinal Cannabis Awareness Week website last year, which the TGA said illegally advertised medicinal cannabis.
Separate to the TGA case, it has also emerged that Cannabis Council Australia, a lobby group set up to represent the entire industry’s agenda, is entirely owned by Montu and has as its directors Christopher Strauch and two of the company’s senior executives.
Big Tobacco. Big Pharma. Big Weed.
At least your local dealer is an honest criminal: they’re just selling weed for folks to get high and that’s all there is to it.
