Madrid
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After several months of intense debate in the Health subcommittee of the Congress of Deputies, the PSOE presented this Monday to the rest of the parties its proposal to regulate the use of medical cannabis. They now have ten days to improve their text, and according to parliamentary sources yesterday, it is expected that it will receive many changes to achieve consensus but also to include issues discussed in the subcommittee and that have been left out of the socialist proposal.
The point that has disappointed patients with pain the most is that the dispensing of medicinal cannabis is limited “to services hospital pharmacists where it is prescribed. However, the text leaves the door open to the creation of mechanisms “to facilitate patient access to the master formulas dispensed by hospital pharmacy services, in coordination with the autonomous communities.”
“The patient should not be aware of who wins the elections in their region, the regulation should be done through a government decree, which does not depend on the postal code of the patients,” he says. Carola Perezpresident of the Spanish Observatory of Medicinal Cannabis (OECM) and who has participated in the subcommittee during the interventions of the experts and associations.
In the proposal, in addition, the socialists speak of the fact that therapeutic cannabis should be limited to patients “with multiple sclerosis, some forms of epilepsy and to chronic non-cancer pain (including neuropathic pain “. In Pérez’s opinion, if the rule finally focuses on these three cases, the law will mean a step back, to return “to the model of medication with Sativex [un medicamento que contiene extractos de cannabis y que ya se diagnostica a personas con esclerosis múltiple]. The rest of the patients will end up on the black market.”
The hospital pharmacy It will thus become the place where standardized preparations and master formulas are promoted, which are generally distributed in oils. The text forgets – patients denounce – the use of the cannabis flower as a rescue medication (that is, when opioid analgesia is ineffective or inadequate).
From the European Cannabis Observatory, which also participated in the subcommittee, they go further and believe that “the real debate [más allá de la dispensación farmacéutica o no] it is whether a modern medical cannabis law will be proposed that allows individual and collective self-cultivation as is the case in many countries around the world.”
From United We Can, for its part, the intention is to negotiate to “improve the text” and that it can be approved by a “large majority”. Also in this line, Joshua Gorospe, deputy of the Basque Group and promoter of the subcommittee, said yesterday that the report represents “a step forward” but diagnoses “aspects that would require modifications”, and called for “political influence” for the negotiation that begins now. Gorospe trusts that there is “margin for negotiation” to be able to introduce changes to the text without forgetting to “put people at the center of decisions,” she said.
tight control
On the other hand, and under the premise that the entire process is carried out under strict control (access to therapeutic cannabis will only be provided through the National Health System), the socialist proposal asks “not to take actions” that could lead to a ” greater availability of cannabis outside the clinical context. In addition, it places the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS) as a key player in the regulation of preparations and derivatives.
Precisely the president of the General Council of Pharmaceutical Associations, Jesus Aguilar, defended in the subcommittee the essential participation of the community pharmacy in dispensing these products prescribed by a doctor and proposed the design and implementation of a controlled pilot test.
From the General Council of Pharmacists, once the proposal is known, they regret that the network of 22,000 community pharmacies is left out to facilitate access to these treatments for patients, as is done in the rest of Europe. In this sense, they recall that pharmacies were already excluded from dispensing cannabinoid-based medicines financed by the System and now it is intended to prevent community pharmacists, harming patientsthe preparation of magisterial formulas or dispensing other types of standardized cannabis preparations that are also authorized.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism