Despite the fact there are few to little Aussie doctors with the confidence and knowledge to get behind medicinal cannabis, prescriptions are booming.
Throughout 2019, there were 25,182 approvals for medicinal cannabis by the TGA in Australia, growing every month of year.
January 2019 saw a small 670 prescriptions approved, whilst December 2019 boomed to a massive 3682. We’ll likely be calling that 3682 small in the near future as well.
The growth is largely due to a streamlining of the application process after both doctors and patients complained of lengthy waiting periods and unnecessary red tape.
Unusually, the complaints were heard quite quickly and a new online processing systems was approved by the federal and state health ministers. GPs were also given the new ability to clone scripts they’d already written.
In the last month of 2019, certain prescribers have been able to become authorised prescribers via an application process – cutting the approval rate down from over a week to a few hours.
If the approval rate growth were to continue, we could see more than 100,000 approvals in 2020.
