One of the criteria on our official medical marijuana Physician Certification Form includes an attestation by a physician that they’ve reviewed their patient’s profile on the Arizona Board of Pharmacy’s Controlled Substances Prescription Monitoring Program database before signing the certification.  We included this requirement to ensure that physicians are acting in their patient’s best interest- and making sure that they’re using best practices and checking to see whether their patient has been prescribed other controlled substances before signing the marijuana certification.  Another requirement that we included asks physicians to attest that they’ve reviewed the patient’s medical history including examining the last 12 months of the patient’s medical records before signing.  We also think these requirements are important because other states that have medical marijuana programs have found that some physicians are more focused on getting revenue from signing certifications than on their patient’s health.

As a routine quality check in our certification system, we’ve been asking the Board of Pharmacy to verify whether or not certifying physicians are actually accessing the system (as they have attested).  We’ve identified 3 MDs and 5 Naturopaths that have been routinely attesting that they’ve checked the Controlled Substances Prescription Monitoring Program when they appear to have not checked that regularly.  Dr. Nelson and I sent letters to their licensing boards recently notifying them that it looks like these 8 physicians may be falsely attesting that they’re checking the Prescription Monitoring Program database.  In each case, they appear to have written more than 100 certifications (some several hundred) that included attestations that cannot be verified by the Board of Pharmacy.

Our larger concern is that if these physicians aren’t completing this simple requirement (and making false attestations)- it’s likely that they’re taking other short-cuts that may be jeopardizing their patient’s health- such as not reviewing the patient’s medical history before writing medical marijuana certifications (also required in the series of attestations).  Since these 8 physicians have signed nearly half of the 10,000 medical marijuana medical certifications, we think it’s important that the boards know about this so they can decide if the physician is acting in the patient’s best interest.  The referrals may also have a side effect of discouraging physicians from writing recreational certifications.