.HempCon Blasted for Cheap Medical Pot Prescriptions

Plus Prop 19 ads are turned down by Facebook.

Doctors, patients, and industry members are bashing the organizers of HempCon, which took place August 6-8 in San Jose, for running a de facto medical marijuana prescription mill. Eyewitnesses at the trade show noted long lines of young adults without medical records being quickly processed by about eight doctors for $40 each.

“I would consider one doctor a prescription mill,” said attendee Bob Katzman. “This was seven or eight. My best way to describe it was a price war.” HempCon organizers Mega Productions, noted for running tattoo and porn expos out of Los Angeles, declined to comment.

The Medical Board of California tells doctors to treat marijuana like they would any other drug, and recommend it only after a good faith examination. According to noted physician Dr. Frank Lucido, that would include looking at the patient’s history, coming up with a treatment plan, and discussing side effects. Such an exam can take 30 to 45 minutes, a much slower tempo than was apparent at HempCon.

“What you saw was a thousand people holding clipboards and forms, moving in and out of line so fast it was hard to imagine [the doctors] were doing a proper job,” said Jeremiah Schimp, spokesperson for Weedtracker.com and a HempCon attendee.

“There’s a likelihood that it skirts acceptable medical guidelines set out by the state medical board,” said Kris Hermes, spokesperson for Americans for Safe Access. “Arguably, they’re making a mockery of their own role in the medical profession, and the medical cannabis community may suffer as a result of these specialists cutting corners.”

No one is getting hurt by loose recommendations, counters Pierre Werner, cavalier operator of Dr. Reefer out of Las Vegas. He thinks evaluations should get easier across the country. “There’s no real reason you should have a full check-up,” Werner said. “It’s no different than your doctor recommending you eat well, have a good diet, and get plenty of rest.”

Werner is an ex-con who says cannabis helps control his bipolar and schizophrenia symptoms. He employs a couple doctors in Vegas who see patients for five to fifteen minutes, at $200 per patient. Warner charges an extra $100 if a customer lacks medical records, with the added cost going to a physical examination.

Dr. Reefer physicians make $4,000 for eight hours of work and business is booming. Werner is setting up remote locations where his doctors can work via web conferencing software Skype.

Back in California, Lucido said, “I don’t think much of that.” Cannabis might never kill a patient, but a lax diagnosis can. Lucido recalls a male in his twenties who sought a marijuana recommendation to treat asthma and anxiety. Lucido listened to his heart and lungs, and noted a thyroid mass on his neck. He gave the patient a three-month recommendation for cannabis and suggested his primary doctor feel his thyroid. The mass turned out to be cancer that had spread to the lungs. “No one has been killed by marijuana, but when you’re prescribing marijuana for the wrong thing, you could be missing something more serious,” Lucido said.

Generally, people hate going to the doctor, and a weed-driven visit is a chance to engage in preventative medicine. Americans for Safe Access recommends that patients who want medical marijuana broach the topic with their primary doctor. Hermes says even some Kaiser Permanente doctors have recommended it.

But Lucido recommends the opposite. Don’t bring up marijuana with your primary care physician, he says, and if you do, ask to “go off the record” first. “Sometimes you get patients asking their doctor for a recommendation of cannabis and the doctor will turn around and write ‘cannabis user’ in their files,” he said. “As long as there’s a drug war going on, patients have a valid reason not to have cannabis mentioned in their records.”

That confusion may be driving business to fly-by-night recommendation mills. Such mills are increasingly operating out of convention spaces and contributing to a collapse in the price of recommendations, said Katzman. 

Katzman is a businessman who runs the well-reviewed International Cannabis & Hemp Expo. There are at least fifteen weed expos in California this year varying in quality from some that are borderline academic conferences to others that are little more than weed fairs.

Doctor’s recommendations have dropped in California from over $200 a few years ago to $100 to $150 today, he said. Katzman’s next expo will support one doctor who charges $99 per visit, and they take the doctoring seriously.

“Otherwise it makes the whole movement seem invalid,” Katzman said. “There’s a lot of people who question the actual legitimacy of medical cannabis.”

Allergic to opioids, cancer survivor and activist Angel Raich uses cannabis to deal with excruciating pain as she recovers from head surgery. Raich says HempCon erodes gains by patients and contributes to the suffering of those who actually need the plant. “It’s definitely not helping anybody and it shouldn’t be happening,” she said. “It makes all us real patients look like a joke and that makes me mad.”

Mega Productions plans to include marijuana evaluation services at another HempCon in Southern California on September 10 at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Seeds and Stems

Oakland activists behind the ongoing Proposition 19 campaign ran afoul of Facebook last week. Facebook declined to accept campaign advertising because it violated its policy banning images of drugs, drug paraphernalia, or tobacco in its ads. Incongruently, Facebook users are still welcome to play popular social game “Pot Farm.”

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