Israel’s Representative for Public Complaints Report said Monday that in 2017, Israel’s ministry of health was reported to have unjustifiably blocked the use of cannabis in 83% of the cases in which persons seeking to use it for medical purposes filed complaints.
The report by the complaints representative, a role held by State Comptroller Yosef Shapira, said: “Many sick people had fallen victim to an abundance of bureaucratic pitfalls when they appealed to the [health ministry] unit for getting a cannabis license or for renewing their license.”
Shapira also said that those pitfalls included “substantial delays for intake of the requests and for handling the requests, as well as a failure to update [the applicants on the status of their requests].”
Delays included no practical ability to get through to representatives by telephone, failing to respond to inquiries in writing and by fax, and a general attitude of suspicion towards those patients seeking medicinal cannabis.
The comptroller said that, overall, it was not a lack of resources but the health ministry’s outdated mentality when dealing with cannabis that has bene the primary cause of the problem.
The report also said that in many cases, it was only the intervention of the representative that broke through the bureaucratic obstacles blocking the use of cannabis that was clearly necessary for medical purposes.
Depriving patients of cannabis treatment due to stigmas of the past is archaic but it’s not just outdated attitudes standing in the way of people receiving the treatment they need. What the report failed to emphasize is the role of pharmaceutical companies in discouraging the system from making cannabis prescriptions easily accessible.
Getting approval for a medical marijuana license for even a late-stage cancer patient in Israel requires three different forms from two doctors and the HMO, a wait of anywhere between a few weeks and six months, and approval by the health ministry – all just for a plant. Contrast this with obtaining a prescription for Roaccutane (Accutane in the United States), which skin doctors hand out like candy despite very serious potential long-term side-effects.
Without getting into the issue of Israeli attitudes towards cannabis being highly influenced by early 20th century American norms, Israeli society does require a broader public conversation on how Marijuana policies would make the state more or less expressive of actual Jewish values. But what’s clearly not expressive of our people’s ancient values is withholding from the sick natural treatments devoid of side effects in favor of harmful pharmaceuticals.
