Role of Boards of Registration in Regulating Providers in Cannabis Medicine
To improve quality of care in cannabis medicine, healthcare providers must be properly educated and held to the same ethical standard of informed consent required in all medical practice. Boards of Registration for Medicine, Nursing, and Pharmacy bear the responsibility to enforce these standards and ensure compliance among their members.
What is the Role of a Board of Registration?
In conventional medicine, Boards of Registration maintain the standard of care and oversee that practitioners act in their patients’ best interests, documenting thorough medical reasoning and obtaining informed consent. These boards investigate and address serious lapses, especially those driven by financial or career motives, helping maintain public trust in healthcare.
Issues in Regulation of Cannabinoid Medicine
Currently, some practitioners fail to properly evaluate whether cannabis is medically appropriate for patients and provide certifications driven more by fees and incentives than clinical judgment.
Many fail to meet informed consent standards by not discussing risks, benefits, dosing, or administration, leaving patients dependent on dispensary sales staff who lack medical expertise and face conflicts of interest, often resulting in inappropriate or excessive product use.
We call upon Boards of Registration to:
- promulgate guidance and regulation to their members that reinforces practitioners’ duties to their patients in the Cannabinoid Medicine field, as in all others.
- Provide adequate educational resources to their members so that those practitioners can become knowledgeable in this field and live up to their responsibilities to their patients. ACS provides resources to accomplish this goal.
- Become more active in investigating and enforcing practitioner adherence to these ethical and professional standards, especially that of informed consent.
ACS is Ready to Assist Boards of Registration in Cannabis Care
We acknowledge the political sensitivities due to the history of the War on Drugs and DEA enforcement against medical practitioners. However, inactivity by Boards risks eroding trust between patients and clinicians, and adverse patient outcomes from conflicted advice at the point of sale.
The Association of Cannabinoid Specialists stands ready to assist Boards in determining whether standards of care were met in specific cases.