A MEDICINAL cannabis company opening in the Hunter hopes to ease the uncertainty of GPs who have been disinclined to prescribe the drug to date.
CannaPacific, which has a licence to produce and sell medicinal cannabis products via the Department of Health's Special Access Scheme, will officially open its head office in Dudley on Wednesday night.
Dr Erica Cameron-Taylor - a palliative care specialist working on the company's medical team - said they would focus on supporting GPs who had been put off by the "administrative hurdles" and uncertainties of prescribing medicinal cannabis.
She said many GPs were still reluctant to prescribe the drug, and opted to refer patients to stand-alone medicinal cannabis clinics instead.
"The drug has been 'sort of' approved," she said. "It's legal, it's available. But there are a whole lot of administrative hurdles still in place. It has also been approved in a way that other drugs are not.
"Through community pressure, and media pressure, the government felt it had to make medicinal cannabis available, but it hasn't gone through the processes that doctors are used to. I also think there is quite a bit of prejudice, that many feel that perhaps it is not as useful as the community thinks it is, or as some groups of doctors think it is."
Dr Cameron-Taylor said they hoped to be able to help "fill in that evidence base" in the long term.
"We want to explain to GPs that this is a safe, well-tolerated medication - that they prescribe stuff that is much more difficult, and much more worrying than this every day, and if someone can prescribe it, it should be the doctor that knows the patient best," she said.
"They are better with someone who can look at their whole health picture and fit this in if it's appropriate, rather than sending them to a cannabis clinic or having patients getting it off some guy on the internet."
A CannaPacific spokesperson said there had been 31,000 medical cannabis prescriptions approved by the end of 2019, but Australian health regulators expected those numbers to "more than double" in 2020.
"The thing that worries me, as a doctor, about the stand-alone clinics is that you go there to get cannabis.
"Even if your condition is best managed by something else, you're going to walk out with cannabis," she said. "If you go to a doctor who has decided, before you have walked in, what the appropriate drug is - I just don't think it's a good model. It's probably a more profitable model. But this is a healthcare situation, this is a medical situation, and we need to say to the GPs - 'Make your judgement'... We want it to be prescribed by people who can recognise those red flags when there is something else going on."
CannaPacific's production facility, in Lismore, is nearing completion.
Dr Cameron-Taylor said there was some "global evidence" of medicinal cannabis offering some benefits to people suffering chronic arthritic pain, and joint pain, as well as fibromyalgia.
"There is evidence around insomnia and anxiety," she said. "But with the anxiety data, there are only certain sorts of cannabis that are appropriate, so that's once again why it'd be much nicer to have a qualified doctor prescribe it, rather than some guy at the bar at a local tavern, or some guy on the internet.
"There is also some data around it being helpful with nausea, and chronic nausea - particularly with people who are undergoing chemotherapy.
"And we have also seen some benefits in people with multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and tourettes.
"The thing that swung me around to be a bit more positive is that the data coming out of America and Canada shows that if you have access to cannabis, your use of opioids and benzodiazepines is reduced."
