Thousands of Canadians are legally allowed to have and use medical marijuana anywhere in the country. ACMPR is the only way to legally protect yourself from being charged with possessing medical marijuana if you aren’t already. It came into effect on August 24th, 2016, and it allows you to buy and use medical marijuana legally.
For New Patients
Under the ACMPR, the decision to use marijuana for medical purposes is now between the patient and the doctor alone. In the Greenleaf Medical Clinic, a patient must have been diagnosed by a Canadian doctor in the last five years. A patient must have been seen by a family doctor or a specialist in the last year to be able to make an appointment. If you don’t have a family doctor, you can still go to a walk-in clinic a lot.
All medical records must be available to the doctor, the records department, the walk-in clinic, or the hospital.
Please note that we can’t help you find a family doctor or a doctor for your main care. We can connect you with a doctor from the Greenleaf Medical Clinic who has a lot of experience with medical marijuana.
To be able to apply for the ACMPR, you will need to show that you have been diagnosed by a healthcare professional. The doctor or nurse practitioner who evaluates your eligibility for the ACMPR will make sure that your medical records are within a certain (at their discretion) amount of time. They will also verify that the documentation you provided is correct.
People who work in health care must be either doctors or nurse practitioners and meet these rules:
Physician
The doctor must be a member of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and must have a valid licence from the licensing authority in the province or territory where they work. They must also have a valid narcotics class 1 licence from the province or territory where they work.
Nurse Practitioner
Health Canada has just made nurse practitioners eligible to sign the ACMPR prescription, which is part of the ACMPR. Allowing nurse practitioners to do this will help many of the people they help and is a good way to expand their scope of practice.
Prescription: What is a Prescription under Canadian Laws ?
“By mouth,” “three times a day,” and “100 mg” are all examples of what a prescription should say about a drug. It should also say how much the drug should be taken and how often it should be taken. If a drug is to be taken “as needed” (PRN), the prescriber must tell you how often it can be taken, how much you can take in a day, and why you should take it (e.g., “for severe pain”).
Clinicians know exactly what the patient will get, how it will be given, how strong it is, how much and how often it will be taken. If there are questions, prescribers can look online and print resources, such as the drug’s Drug Product Monograph from Health Canada, to find out more about the drug. An official scientific document called a Drug Product Monograph describes the properties, claims, indications and contraindications, and action of the drug. It also includes any other information that is important for the drug to be used safely and effectively.
The process of recommending medical cannabis is very different from prescribing a drug. In every province, the doctor doesn’t write a prescription that can be filled at a pharmacy. Instead, they fill out a form for Health Canada that says the patient should be enrolled in the medical cannabis program. People who qualify for the program can sign up as clients with licensed cannabis producers.
On the form, the doctor or nurse must say:
The date on which the document was made.
The patient’s name, last name, and birth date
The name and last name of the doctor or nurse practitioner who signed off on the order
In the patient’s registration document, the shipping address is written down.
A maximum of “five grams of dried cannabis” can be prescribed for each patient each day, which for 30 days comes to 150 grams, which is the maximum amount a person can have without breaking the law. The maximum dosage should not exceed three grams a day.
Medical cannabis can be ordered by name, such as “strain,” if desired.
Various strains of marijuana are grown to have varying concentrations of THC, responsible for the effects of cannabis. They also have varying ratios of CBD to THC. Specifying the strain may help you figure out how much THC and how much CBD each strain has, but it also requires knowledge about how each strain is different. The fact that the names of strains can be different from one company to the next complicates things.
Producers also have the power to substitute a strain that is similar if the one named by the doctor isn’t in stock. In order to avoid this, the College of Family Physicians of Canada says that doctors must spell out the percentage of THC (for example, 9 percent or less THC) and ask producers to send information on the THC percentage to the doctor’s office. This will help avoid this problem.
It doesn’t matter what kind of dried cannabis is recommended, because producers use formulas to change it into other forms.
Basically, “prescriptions” for medicinal cannabis are permissions to get the drug, not a precise description of a controlled drug that is made and given to you by a pharmacist. Instead of prescriptions for medicines, they are more like permission slips with non-binding suggestions.