MMJ App. Rejected Due To Sanctioned Dr.

[AllenScott]

For those of you who have recently been denied by the state of Colorado due to alleged Doctor's sanctions, please be sure you are aware of the true facts. On October 18th, 2010, the Colorado Medical Board held a meeting and decided that they would target 18 doctors across the state of Colorado with "conditional licenses". http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/hs/medi...2010_18_10.pdf http://www.cdphe.state.co.us/hs/medi...NA%20REGIS.pdf There are different classifications for a Doctor's License; active, active restricted (cannot practice), active with conditions (CAN LEGALLY PRACTICE). All of these doctors had full disclosure of the status of their licenses, and were in good standing to sign Medical Marijuana recommendations before October 18, 2010. It is no coincidence that two weeks before elections, this decision was made, and the Registry was told that they COULD NOT notify any of these doctors. Many doctors found out after thousands of their patient's applications were returned during a mass mailed on October 28th, 2010 stating that these doctors were not allowed to prescribe medical marijuana by the state of Colorado. These doctors have been helping patients in the community since the beginning, and are qualified, caring physicians. What the "powers that be" did not consider are the hundreds of thousands of patient that they were affecting for political reasons. The main concern of the physicians at this time is to assist their patients in getting legal licenses again, because at this point, anyone who has received any rejection letter because of this decision are NOT LEGAL. Please make sure that the people responsible for this blasphemous decision are inundated with phone calls, letters and complaints for their complete disregard of these patients well being.

I cannot speak for all 18 doctors, but I can speak for the ones that I have personal knowledge of. They are currently seeking legal action and are fighting to get a temporary injuction. I only wish this would have been widely publicized before the elections today, as I believe many people would have changed their voting decisions.

My heart goes out to all patients who have been affected by this and please know that these physicians are still dedicated to your care and comfort.

Your words are appreciated and I thank you. Reading between the lines I sense you are a Doctor involved or work with one.

I understand the decision to include the new classes of restriction in the "allowed" or "not allowed" to Recommend MMJ was made without Public input as the law prescribes. This is clearly outside the law.

I have heard there has been an injunction placed now and these recommendations are once again "legal". Am I wrong?

Allen

[Budbudda]

I just received, 75 days after sending in my application by registered mail, a rejection letter from the state saying the Dr. the MMJ Center hooked me up with has sanctions on her license and can not recommend MMJ.

I started to grow my medicine at 35 days post app. mailing.

I have A.I.D.S. and have now been made an outlaw. Nice.

Now what do I do? Start over? Kill my medicine?

Allen

So sorry to hear about this and sorry to hear about your diagnosis.

I would go back to the mmc that recommended this doctor and ask them to help you remedy the situation - you are probably not the only one this happened to. If they are at all reputable they will do the right thing. If they don't please be sure to post which mmc it is!

Don't kill the meds. What is the first rule about your grow room? Don't talk about the grow room! To anyone!

Good luck to you.

[Budbudda]

If she is your ob/gyn then apparently she's been in trouble before:

Malpractice & Sanctions Information for Dr. Janet C Dean - Obstetrics & Gynecology - Denver, CO

I don't think you are going to find too many obstetricians without a sanction or two of this type.

[copobo]

yea, sounded like there was a tough birth and she went outside of norms hoping for a win, and lost.

[VapedG13]

Colorado is a tricky place.... the docotrs who wrote your scrip for MMJ at the time were legal....they made it so if the DR .doesnt qualify under their NEW guidlines......the script is invalid

The Same docotor that the State says gave you an invalid scrip for MMJ.... can still write scrips for percocet, volume, oxycotton.....but not MMJ...Makes alot of sense:wtf:

Best thing you can do is GROW YOUR OWN...fuck um all :thumbsup:

[VapedG13]

Dr. Janet C. Dean in Denver.

Talk about some stupid wording:wtf: this is the case of DR. Janet Dean

DENVER - Some 1,300 people waiting for medical marijuana cards in Colorado are in limbo because of a dispute over which doctors can recommend pot.

Colorado health regulators are puzzling over how to interpret a new state law requiring doctors that recommend pot to be "in good standing." The requirement, which took effect in July, led the state to send rejection letters to thousands of marijuana-card applicants who used recommendations from doctors with restrictions or conditions on their medical licenses.

Problem is, there's a difference between doctors with "restrictions" and doctors with "conditions" on their licenses. The distinction â?? with "restrictions" considered more serious than "conditions" â?? has thousands of would-be marijuana patients saying they were wrongly rejected, and the Colorado Medical Society joining marijuana advocates in the dispute.

"There's thousands and thousands of patients out there who probably feel they've been scammed," said Dr. Janet Dean, a Denver physician who is licensed with conditions. The conditions on her medical license are related to obstetrics and gynecology â?? not the ailments for which she's been writing medical marijuana recommendations for more than a year.

Dean found out a few weeks ago that some of her patients were getting rejection letters saying that she was unqualified to write them. She went to a health advisory committee considering the "in good standing" question and argued that the state would be wrong to reject all physicians "with conditions" because many of those conditions don't relate to recommending drugs.

The Colorado Medical Society agreed, giving the example of a neurosurgeon developing arthritis. Conditions could be added to that surgeon's license, such as additional supervision for surgery, but that physician is still allowed to perform "the full scope of medical practice," something a doctor with a restricted license may not.

Doctors with restrictions can also be barred from certain privileges in a hospital, or barred from working in federally funded health clinics, prohibitions that wouldn't affect a licensee with conditions.

Kari Hershey, lawyer for the Colorado Medical Society, argued that lumping in both kinds of doctors could lead to limits on how doctors with conditions could practice.

"It improperly punishes a whole range of physicians," Hershey said.

Colorado health authorities sent marijuana rejection letters to 500 applicants whose recommendations came from doctors with restricted licenses and to 1,300 patients with recommendations from doctors with conditions on their licenses. Draft rules considered by the health department's Medical Marijuana Advisory Committee requires recommendations from a physician with "a fully active license with no restrictions or conditions."

One of the committee members, Ted Tow of the Colorado District Attorneys' Council, said both kinds of doctors should be banned from writing marijuana recommendations. The distinction between restricted doctors and doctors with conditions, he said, is too academic.

"That's all hyper-technical inside-baseball stuff," said Tow, who argues that lawmakers probably intended both types of doctors to be banned from recommending pot.

The marijuana advisory committee hasn't decided which interpretation to recommend to the full Board of Health. A final decision won't be made until March at the earliest.

In the meantime, state health authorities have sent new letters to the 1,300 patients telling them that their applications are on hold until the matter is settled. As long as those patients can show that they've applied, they'll be allowed to buy medical marijuana, but they won't have cards until sometime next year.

Marijuana activists say the confusing doctor delay isn't fair for the 1,300 patients who thought they had a doctor's approval to use pot.

"They've had their recommendations denied through no fault of their own," Josh Kappal of Sensible Colorado told the marijuana advisory committee.

As for the 500 patients with recommendations from doctors with restricted licenses? They're out of luck. They'll have to find unrestricted doctors â?? and pay another $90 application fee â?? if they want to be considered

[VapedG13]

Heres the full story .........she refers to Dr.Janet

"She also wrote recommendations for medical marijuana, seeing thousands of patients over the course of the past year-plus, by her estimate.

She adds that she phoned the state's Medical Marijuana Registry both before and after the passage of SB 109 to make sure that she could continue doing so, and she says she was reassured that "everything was fine."

Over the past week or so, medical marijuana patients across the state have learned that doctor recommendations for the card allowing them to use MMJ have been rejected. Why? A new health department policy that slid into place almost unnoticed -- one that's likely to disenfranchise and anger nearly 2,000 patients, as well as infuriating impacted doctors and clinics.

Why? A change in definition for doctors approved to write medical marijuana recommendations that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment began enforcing late last month. Department spokesman Mark Salley confirms that eighteen doctors specializing in MMJ are now forbidden to recommend cannabis. But instead of informing the affected physicians, the department has been telling patients who received the recommendations, some of which date back to the early months of 2010. They've then been filling in the doctors, often in extremely heated ways.


Dr. Ned Calonge.
​Some background: Amendment 20, the 2000 measure that legalized medical marijuana in Colorado, defines a physician allowed to recommend medical marijuana as "a doctor of medicine who maintains, in good standing, a license to practice medicine issued by the state of Colorado." But in recent years, Ned Calonge, Colorado's chief medical officer until earlier this month, has been concerned about doctors who specialize in writing MMJ recommendations without engaging in followup care with patients.

In a 2009 Westword interview, Calonge decried such doctors, saying, "You might walk in to a dispensary, and they give you a pre-completed form. You check off chronic pain. They might do a blood-pressure check, and then a physician looks at you, asks you a couple of questions, signs your form and your application is complete. And that's not appropriate medical care. That's substandard." He added that recommendations from just fifteen doctors statewide led to 73 percent of the state's almost 16,000 MMJ licenses at that writing.

State Senator Chris Romer believed many of these patients didn't really need medical marijuana -- and he set out to tighten restrictions on doctors specializing in MMJ as a result. That's why Senate Bill 109, which he sponsored, defines a doctor in good standing like so:

THE PHYSICIAN HOLDS A DOCTOR OF MEDICINE OR DOCTOR OF OSTEOPATHIC MEDICINE DEGREE FROM AN ACCREDITED MEDICAL SCHOOL; THE PHYSICIAN HOLDS A VALID, UNRESTRICTED LICENSE TO PRACTICE MEDICINE IN COLORADO; AND THE PHYSICIAN HAS A VALID AND UNRESTRICTED UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE FEDERAL DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES REGISTRATION.
The key word in the passage above is "unrestricted." Some doctors' licenses are tagged with conditions or stipulations often related to a specific area of practice. And it so happens that many of the most prolific recommenders of medical marijuana have such restrictions. Until Colorado Governor Bill Ritter signed SB 109 in June, these doctors could recommend medical marijuana -- and for months afterward, they continued to do so. Little did most of them know that recommendations written afterward, and even ones written in the months before the measure became law, would be rejected.

Dr. Janet Dean, an OB/GYN based in Denver, found this out the hard way.

Dean has a condition on her license that requires OB/GYN charts for her patients to be reviewed for eighteen months. She declines to provide specifics about what this twenty-year medical veteran calls the "witch hunt" that led to the determination, although HealthGrades.com reports that in March 2008, she "failed to meet the standard of care in her treatment of a patient in which the physician had provided prenatal care, operative delivery of a male infant, and postpartum care.


​Although more than eighteen months have passed since March 2008, the clock hasn't started ticking because Dean has been unable to find a job in her area of specialty. So last September, she began working for a clinic that focuses on medical marijuana recommendations. (She declines to name the business.) She stresses that the condition on her license doesn't prevent her from any other areas of practice. "I can write prescriptions for Oxycontin," she says. "I can write prescriptions for Percocet. I can write prescriptions for Vicodin."

She also wrote recommendations for medical marijuana, seeing thousands of patients over the course of the past year-plus, by her estimate. She adds that she phoned the state's Medical Marijuana Registry both before and after the passage of SB 109 to make sure that she could continue doing so, and she says she was reassured that "everything was fine."

But then, in recent days, she started getting calls from patients saying their card applications had been rejected because she was not qualified to recommend MMJ. "We're getting threats. Not physical threats, but, 'We're going to sue you for fraud, because you've stolen our money,'" she notes -- an assertion borne out by posts on local marijuana message boards like this one. "They're up in arms, and you can't blame them. But they don't realize the health department changed the rules in the middle of the game."

Health department spokesman Mark Salley doesn't put it quite that way -- but he does acknowledge that "when the state legislature was considering bills that further refined a bona fide doctor-patient relationship, and also further clarified the definition of a physician in good standing, we began holding applications that had physician authorizations from physicians who had a restriction or condition on their license


This continued up until an October 18 meeting of the volunteer medical marijuana advisory committee. After a health department presentation about the importance of preventing doctors with restricted licenses from recommending MMJ, the committee signed off on the proposal, Salley says. He adds that "we're not making value judgments on various conditions that might be on a license" -- like, for instance, the one on Dean's, which apparently has little to do with her competency to recommend medical marijuana. "Any license that has a condition is not an unrestricted license in the language of the Senate bill. That's what our legal advice has been."


Laura Kriho.
​A week later, on October 25 -- after the department "finished getting legal advice and consulted the Board of Medical Examiners," Salley says -- personnel began returning the applications of patients with recommendations from Dean and the other seventeen doctors flagged for license restrictions. Complaints from patients soon erupted.

How many are affected? In a letter to various health department personnel, including acting chief medical officer Dr. Lisa Miller, Laura Kriho of the Cannabis Therapy Institute used the number 5,000, but Salley disputes that total. He says the actual amount is between 1,000 and 2,000 -- but closer to 2,000.

The health department has been overwhelmed by applications in recent years, with a processing backlog that's stretched out to many months. Did the department use the new SB 109 language, even before it became law, as a way of lightening the load? While Dean concedes, "It's certainly possible that's a part of it," she declines to point fingers -- although she does take a swipe at what she refers to as "retroactive" enforcement that included patients from before SB 109's passage.

Salley isn't sure the word "retroactive" is applicable in this instance. He stresses that the department won't disallow previously issued cards from physicians with license restrictions, but he says when those cards come up for renewal, the patients will have to go to a doctor with no license conditions. He's less definitive about what will happen for patients who have been using their application forms to obtain medical marijuana in lieu of an actual card, as they're authorized to do if there's a delay of more than 35 days. But he believes the entire backlog of applications will be eliminated by year's end.

In the past, the department of health has been sanctioned for making new rules without getting proper public input -- most notably when Judge Larry Naves disallowed a new caregiver definition last November. The Cannabis Therapy Institute charges the health department with doing the same thing this time around. To that, Salley says the Board of Health will formally address the issue at a future meeting, probably early next year -- and he points out that the advisory committee meeting on October 18 was open to the public.

Speaking of which, Dean plans to attend the next advisory committee session, slated for November 10, to dispute the health department's decision. It appears to be the only forum for her to express her displeasure. Meanwhile, patients who've waited months for their licenses are in the position of starting over -- and Dean says clinics like hers can't afford to do new examinations for free, especially given that some of the patients she saw are scattered across Colorado. She notes that she even did some recommendations by video-conference.

At this point, Dean seems resigned to the thought that she'll no longer be able to write medical marijuana recommendations, but she still feels the health department's reasoning is faulty -- and she's highly critical of the way the office implemented the change. In her words, "The way they've handled this is abhorrent to me."

[GratefulMeds]

1) The reality is that your are in little danger of criminal prosecution. Keep a copy of your AIDS medical paperwork near the marijuana in the event the police come after you. Which they won't if you're growing and medicating at home and not taking it out of the home.

2) Get another doctor recommendation, and file again. Yes, you're out the other doctor's fee, but such is life.

3) Stay positive! Don't let bureaucratic nonsense get you down. It's not personal and your optimistic attitude is all that matters. Stay up, stay happy, and do whatever you feel helps you.

These statements are very true, under the Colorado Constitution if you have a qualified condition which you absolutely do, you are able to consume, grow posses etc. etc. the doctors recommendation is exactly that a recommendation, under the law you are legal!!!:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

[MtnLionCO]

Janet dean works for healthstar or used too, if the health dept doesn't want to release the names of these "banned" docs we need to post the names ourselfs,

I know of three, Janet dean, kevin klemmer, and James boland..

James Boland is listed as active. How do you know he is banned?

[copobo]

this is a good question searching on this topic.

How DO we know James Boland is banned?

BOLAND, JAMES EDWARD 26796 Active DR LITTLETON, CO 07/30/200