Tailoring New Marketing Opportunities

"I think this is a serious problem. There is definitely a need for doctors to learn how to appropriately prescribe medical marijuana."
"But that should not be paid for by the people who stand to profit from increased sales."
Dr. Joel Lexchin, health-policy expert, emergency doctor, Toronto

"Recreational cannabis is now more accessible and available than medical cannabis, increasing the risk that patients can and will self-medicate."
"Ultimately, we believe the best way to support patients looking to use this therapy is through education for health care practitioners."
Catherine Thomas, spokeswoman, Shoppers Drug Mart

"They are sales people."
"[Shoppers Drug Mart seminars are geared to teaching doctors appropriate application to patients and to] gain practical, hands-on tips [purportedly; while increasing sales potential is the obvious goal]."
Kimberly Elliot, former Shoppers Drug Mart sales representative

"It does seem like the same type of marketing used for pharmaceutical products."
"It is concerning."
Dr. Nav Persaud, family medicine professor, prescription-drug use, University of Toronto

Some doctors say they have no idea how to properly prescribe a product patients ingest through smoking. (Livia Manywounds/CBC)

With the legalization of cannabis that took place on October 17 in Canada, a vast proliferation of marketing strategies have arisen. The prospect of a population hungry for the use of marijuana and its byproducts has entrepreneurs, growers, sellers, advertisers glowing with the image of wealth dancing before their eyes. Provinces have discovered that despite a large number of grow operations functioning around the clock, product is in scarce supply; providers have been unable to meet demand.

And one of the first reasons for legalizing marijuana, to defeat the criminal element that markets cannabis among their other wares, appears to have misfired, with users becoming fed up with delays in deliveries and insufficient stock, returning to the security-of-supply their dealers represent. The pharmaceutical industry is elated at their own reading of the expanded opportunities open to them in this new, lucrative market. And it has renewed an old industry function of wooing doctors, favouring them with freebies in the persuasion of professional prescriptions.

The practice of company-sponsored seminars has been enlisted in a new campaign to persuade the medical profession that their suspicion and reluctance to prescribe cannabis is ill-informed, and the glowing promise of marijuana's potential to aid all that makes people ill must be promulgated and in the process persuasively enlist the cooperation of prescribing physicians. Specialist known as "key opinion leaders" (aka salespeople) have joined the fray.

Shoppers Drug Mart, a 1,300-store chain of pharmacies dominating the country's merchandising of prescription drugs, has planned a series of events around the country ostensibly to 'teach' prescribers all about cannabis. Shoppers is busy establishing itself as a major retailer of marijuana. They have arranged for "internationally renowned" speakers representing academic and health-care affiliates to speak convincingly to a practitioner-audience.

Canada has two separate cannabis markets— recreational and medical. (CBC)

No mention made, needless to say, that these speakers have ties compromising their medical neutrality, to marijuana-producing corporate interests and to private cannabis clinics. This is known as the corporatization of medicinal weed and is now extending itself to the sales potential -- clearly the sky is the limit -- of recreational weed the public is clamouring to obtain. Big Pharma once again, engaged in direct-to-physician marketing. Corrupt? Um, could be!

The sessions have a really neat title: "Medical cannabis: the future is now"; got that? Some of these sales seminars posing as medical information seminars have kicked off in Calgary and Vancouver, fronted by a "welcoming reception"; more are in the works for Toronto and Ottawa. The speakers, according to Shoppers, possess a wealth of vital knowledge, and are not engaged in touting cannabis brands whatever.

A Health Canada cannabis production licence in hand, Shoppers clearly plans to become the country's leading seller of marijuana, obtained through other companies producing it. The aim is to permit druggists to dispense medical cannabis by lobbying the federal government to agree with the proposal. Sales, without that dispensing capability by pharmacists employed by the chain are by telephone and online exclusively, with delivery made to customers' homes.

The speakers are paid a pharmaceutical industry average of $2,000 or more for each of their talks at seminars. As for the continuing medical education doctors are exposed to, there isn't much other than what Shoppers is offering. And doctors have been notoriously loathe to prescribe a drug they know little about, a drug in fact that little is known about, since there hasn't been very much research on its effects in the short- and long-term, much less details such as how much is too much, and which types are best prescribed...

There have been studies, however, finding evidence that such seminars encourage less-than-stellar prescribing, the seminars having the effect of persuading physicians in favour of the sponsor's products. Hello? What else is new! In fact drug companies are known to monitor prescription patterns before and following such talks and to respond to the results by dumping those doctors who haven't increased sales.

Speakers include a Vancouver internal medicine specialist, medical director of a private cannabis clinic, and on the advisory board of four cannabis companies. Another, a Toronto palliative-care physician paid earlier to give talks by three marijuana companies; another the director of pain research at a major Toronto hospital on the advisory boards of two cannabis corporation; a Winnipeg oncologist on the advisory board of another marijuana firm; and an American physician who heads his own cannabis consulting company.

"I think it's kind of unseemly", commented Dr. Tom Perry, clinical pharmacology expert at the  University of British Columbia. Quite an understatement.

Shoppers Drug Mart invited doctors to medical cannabis education sessions being held across Canada. (CBC)