“I don’t understand – yesterday I sent the email and I got sent the new prescription. I went to the pharmacy as usual to get my medicine and was told that I’ll have to start going to the doctor each time now to get the white control card signed,” he recounted. 

“Every month I have to go to Paola now, and it’s definitely more of a problem like this than how it was before,” he said.

The patient detailed how he had lost his leg in an accident a few years back, and it is quite hard for him to travel to his doctor each month.

“I was in an accident in 2015, six years ago, and I started using medical cannabis around 2018,” he said, being one of the first patients to adopt the then-new medicine.

“I had gone to the doctor and explained everything about my situation and I had started with this kind of medicine. It makes me feel good, and with it, I managed to stop all other types of medicine,” he detailed.

“The medicine should be accessible for the people who really need it, I’ve used it for more than three years – the pharmacy and doctor know me, I don’t understand why I have to do all of this,” he lamented.

It is also important to note that due to cannabis only being prescribed by specialists, patients will have to spend more money in order to get their white control card signed every month.

Even though Malta was revolutionary when it introduced medical cannabis back in 2018, the current system is far from being patient-friendly.

So much so, that medical cannabis is still classified within the ‘dangerous drugs and narcotics section’ along with much harder drugs such as valium, which further illustrates the stigma which is still very well alive and kicking.

Do you think the medical cannabis industry should be more patient-friendly?