The New York State Department of Health says they will be creating a directory of doctors registered to sign patients up for medical marijuana but in the meantime it can be hard to find registered physicians.
Nancy Adams at the Monroe County Medical Society says
when the Compassionate Care Act Passed, legalizing the use of medical
cannabis for specific patients under specific circumstances, she was
excited. She's a proponent of the treatment option and she thought
people who were eligible and in need would have access to the drug in
January.Well, it's January.
"What's actually panned out here is that there actually are very few physicians in New York State relatively speaking who have actually taken the course and met the requirements to certify patients for medical marijuana use."
Adams says most of these doctors are downstate, and she said she didn't know of any doctors in the area who were registered.
It turns out, finding out exactly who is registered and where they are is difficult, but, we do know of at least one doctor in Monroe County who is registered.
His name is Steven Ognibene. He's a rectal surgeon.
"New York State has some very strict rules about what diseases will be covered or acceptable to register their patients for, two of those conditions were very applicable to my profession.
Getting registered was really easy, Ognibene says: all it took was an application, a 4.5 hour online training course, and a few forms from the Department of Health.
But actually recommending and signing a patient up is a really complicated process.
"It is still considered a class one substance which is still illegal in the United States as deemed by the federal government."
Which means doctors can't prescribe it in a traditional way, and there are a lot of extra steps to separate the doctor from the cannabis.
It goes something like this: A doctor can talk to their patients about the benefits of medical marijuana, which is protected under the laws of freedom of speech. Then the patient can leave, make a decision on their own, and then ask the doctor to help them sign up to be on the cannabis registry later.
"The frustrating thing about that is we lose a little bit of control over how the patients have decided to use the product.
Ognibene hasn't signed any of his patients up, yet. Despite his frustrations, he's actually very optimistic about the potential benefits of medical marijuana.
In fact, he didn't just get registered just for the sake of his practice and his patient. Ognibene has a son, Vinny, with epilepsy.
"At the age of about sixteen or eighteen months, started showing a very rapid decline in neurological function, losing his language skills, and actually starting to have seizures."
In the beginning, it was somewhere between 75 and 100 seizures a day. Vinny is 10-years-old now, and averaging one or two seizures a day, Ognibene says, but they're more severe.
"Despite I would say a dozen different medications, special restrictive diets, intravenous therapies, we've had no luck getting his epilepsy under control."
But there's one thing they haven't tried.
Ognibene is hopeful that medical marijuana could help his son. And he says Vinny's doctors think he's an eligible candidate as well.
"I wanted to make sure that the process was as easy as I hoped it would be, and I could use some of that to help our neurology team to understand and demystify the process to understand it's not as hard and daunting of a process as it sounds."
Ognibene says as much as he'd like to, he can't register his son himself. In the meantime, he's waiting on his son's doctors to register with the state.
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