A System Built on Sentiment, Not Science
What began as a compassionate response to desperate families seeking relief for children with epilepsy has morphed into what critics aptly describe as “a commercial monster” – a barely regulated medicinal cannabis industry where doctors write cannabis prescriptions every four minutes and patients receive “Chernobyl-strength” products after brief phone consultations with non-medical staff.
The numbers are staggering and speak to a system utterly divorced from proper medical oversight. One doctor issued 17,000 scripts in six months – mathematically impossible to provide adequate patient care. Eight practitioners each churned out over 10,000 prescriptions for the highest-strength THC products in just half a year. A single pharmacist dispensed nearly one million cannabis products annually – that’s 2,600 products every single day for an entire year without a break.
These aren’t the statistics of a carefully managed medical programme. They’re the hallmarks of a prescription mill operating under the thin veneer of healthcare legitimacy.
The “Vote for Medicine” Deception
The rot began with what the Dalgarno Institute correctly identifies as the “vote for medicine” protocol – a deliberate strategy to bypass rigorous clinical trials and scientific evidence in favour of emotional manipulation and political pressure. The Victorian Law Reform Commission’s 2014 consultation was a masterclass in manufactured consent, drawing from a mere 99 submissions and poorly attended public hearings dominated by cannabis advocates.
As one observer noted, the process was rigged from the start: “The facilitators inferred that the Government already has legislation in place with this current ‘consultation’ process simply in play to validate those changes and therefore it is in essence a foregone conclusion.”
Policymakers staged political theatre, disguising the legitimisation of a recreational drug as compassion and medical necessity, abandoning evidence-based policymaking. The consultation process heavily favoured bias, systematically marginalising and silencing the Dalgarno Institute’s representative when they presented evidence-based research on cannabis harms. Meanwhile, cannabis advocates freely made unsubstantiated claims such as “Many, many people have been cured – from just about anything and everything” – statements now debunked by a decade of disappointing clinical outcomes.
Doctors as Drug Dealers
The transformation of medical practitioners into what one doctor described as “glorified cannabis dealers” represents a fundamental corruption of the medical profession. Dr Claire Noonan’s experience exposes the insidious pressure applied to healthcare providers: “There was a bit of pressure to be, perhaps more of a dealer… it’s more being used for my signature on a script.”
When doctors earn money based on the number of prescriptions they write, when companies pressure practitioners to override their clinical judgment, and when nurses without medical training conduct “consultations,” it stops being medicine. It’s a sophisticated drug distribution network masquerading as healthcare.
The conflict of interest is breathtaking: companies pay doctors to write prescriptions, then directly sell and ship the products to patients. This vertically integrated drug business model operates so efficiently and with such legal protection that it would make any street dealer envious. Some companies even pay commissions to shop owners who host their iPad kiosks, creating a multi-tiered financial incentive structure that has nothing to do with patient care and everything to do with maximising drug sales.
The Australian Medical Association has recognised this perversion of medical practice, with doctors coining the phrase “I’m a healer not a dealer” – yet the system continues to pressure practitioners into exactly that role. Young doctors and those without specialist training are particularly vulnerable to these pressures, potentially compromising an entire generation of medical professionals.
The Mental Health Time Bomb
Perhaps most damning is the mounting evidence of mental health catastrophes directly linked to these prescribing practices. Rohan Dawson’s experience – receiving 27% THC cannabis that left him feeling like he was “on Pluto” and significantly worsened his anxiety – is not an isolated incident. It’s a predictable outcome when profit trumps patient safety.
Recent reports document a significant increase in hospitalisations due to psychosis amongst patients prescribed medicinal cannabis. Some patients with pre-existing mental health conditions are experiencing severe relapses. One patient developed psychosis and required hospitalisation, while another tragically took his own life after receiving a medicinal cannabis prescription from the company Dispensed. These events led to bans on the founding pharmacist and two prescribing doctors.
Professor Ian McGregor’s warnings about high-THC products ring prophetic: “Higher-THC products appear to be more linked to mental health adverse outcomes, precipitation of severe anxiety and paranoia in vulnerable individuals, perhaps schizophrenia and manic attacks.”
Yet the industry relentlessly drives an “arms race” toward ever-stronger products, with some containing up to 98% THC concentration—far exceeding anything therapeutic for the vast majority of patients. Companies have pushed the average THC content to 25%, with some products reaching 34%—levels that any rational medical standard would have deemed dangerous just a decade ago.
The irony is palpable: a system supposedly designed to help patients with anxiety and mental health conditions is systematically prescribing substances that worsen those very conditions. This isn’t medical negligence—it’s institutionalised harm posing as healthcare.
Regulatory Capture and Bureaucratic Cowardice
The Therapeutic Goods Administration’s capitulation to political pressure represents a spectacular failure of regulatory oversight. By creating loopholes that allow “unapproved medicines” to bypass safety, quality, and efficacy testing, the TGA essentially abdicated its primary responsibility to protect public health.
These products aren’t subjected to the rigorous clinical trials required of legitimate pharmaceuticals. Instead, they rely on what regulators euphemistically call “compassion” and “exceptionality” – code words for abandoning scientific standards in favour of political expediency.
The TGA openly admits: “unapproved therapeutic goods accessed through these pathways have not been evaluated by the TGA for safety, quality and efficacy.” Despite this, regulators continue to permit the prescription of these untested substances to vulnerable patients, including those with serious mental health conditions.
The result is a two-tiered medical system where cannabis gets special treatment unavailable to any other therapeutic substance. As the Dalgarno Institute notes, despite over 11,420 studies on cannabis THC alone costing $4.877 billion, “the very best we can come up with from all this promised panacea of all ills is essentially the same therapeutics that were already available for prescription.”
This regulatory failure becomes even more egregious when one considers that schedule eight medications – the same classification as opioids – require such extraordinary prescribing volumes without proper oversight. The TGA has handed out over $2.5 million in fines for illegal cannabis advertising since 2020, yet continues to allow the underlying system that enables such practices to operate with impunity.
The Inevitable Outcome
These problems arose inevitably from a flawed system built on sentiment rather than science. When Western Australia legalised medicinal cannabis in 2017, not a single doctor in the state would prescribe it initially. The medical profession’s reluctance should have been a warning sign, not an obstacle to overcome through political pressure.
Instead of heeding medical professionals’ concerns, politicians became drug pushers, with Premier Mark McGowan actively promoting cannabis use when doctors refused to participate in what they recognised as medically unsound. Subsequent events vindicated the medical community’s initial boycott, yet policymakers dismissed their warnings as obstructionism rather than acknowledging their professional responsibility.
Victoria’s own pilot programme provided a glimpse of what was to come: more than a third of children receiving taxpayer-funded medicinal cannabis discontinued treatment because the drugs simply didn’t work. At approximately $35,000 per child, this represented not just wasted public money but failed expectations for families desperate for genuine medical solutions.
The Subscription Model of Addiction
Perhaps most sinister is the industry’s adoption of subscription models that ensure patients continue receiving cannabis products regardless of their medical needs or outcomes. Rohan Dawson’s experience is illustrative: “Despite never having another appointment, he continued to be billed under a subscription model and more cannabis arrived at his door.”
This isn’t healthcare – it’s a drug dealing operation with automatic billing. Patients who stop using products due to adverse effects continue to receive shipments and bills, creating a system designed to maintain drug dependency rather than treat medical conditions. The efficiency that companies boast about – “I was alarmed by how efficient it is… these companies, they know how to roll this stuff out” – is the efficiency of drug distribution, not medical care.
The True Cost
Real patients have suffered from this “medicinal” cannabis debacle—patients have seen their mental health deteriorate, their anxiety worsen, and their lives damaged by a system that prioritises industry profits over their welfare.
Meanwhile, the industry celebrates reaching “cost parity with illicit products” – a telling admission that this was never really about medicine but about creating a legal pathway for recreational drug access under medical cover. When prescription cannabis becomes cheaper than street drugs, and when practitioners boast about convenience rather than efficacy, the medical pretence becomes impossible to maintain.
The environmental cost is equally staggering, with 42 tonnes of cannabis imported annually from Canada – a carbon footprint that would be unconscionable for any other medical treatment with such poor efficacy outcomes. This massive importation also represents a fundamental failure of the local industry that politicians promised would create jobs and economic benefits.
International Warnings Ignored
Australia’s headlong rush into medicinal cannabis occurred despite mounting international evidence of problems. North American reports of rising cannabis-related disorders amongst older adults, increasing emergency department visits, and growing recognition of cannabis use disorder should have provided cautionary lessons. Instead, Australian policymakers chose to ignore these warnings in favour of industry lobbying and political expediency.
The parallels with the opioid crisis are unmistakable: aggressive marketing of high-potency products, regulatory capture, medical professionals pressured to prescribe against their better judgement, and a systematic downplaying of addiction risks. Yet Australia seems determined to repeat these mistakes with cannabis, despite having the benefit of hindsight.
A Reckoning Long Overdue
Australia’s medicinal cannabis industry stands as a cautionary tale of what happens when politics, profit, and propaganda override medical evidence and regulatory rigour. The “commercial monster” created by the vote for medicine protocol has produced exactly what critics predicted: a barely regulated drug distribution system masquerading as healthcare.
The time has come for a fundamental reckoning. Patients deserve medicine based on science, not sentiment. They deserve doctors focused on healing, not dealing. And they deserve a regulatory system that protects public health rather than industry profits.
The current system fails on every metric that matters: patient outcomes, medical ethics, regulatory oversight, and public health protection. The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency’s investigation into prescribing practices represents a belated recognition of problems that were predictable from the system’s inception.
Until Australia acknowledges that its prescribed medicinal cannabis programme has become a coercive addiction-for-profit enterprise, more patients will suffer the predictable consequences of prioritising politics over patient safety. The only question is how many more casualties the system will claim before sanity prevails.
The cannabis industry’s transformation from compassionate access programme to commercial monster represents one of the most egregious failures of medical regulation in Australian history. That it occurred with full knowledge of the likely consequences makes it not just a policy failure, but a moral, social and medical catastrophe.
The evidence was always there. The warnings were clear. The outcomes were inevitable. What’s inexcusable is that we allowed it to happen anyway.
WRD News Team
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