Part two of Dr. Rob Kamermans’ exclusive sit-down with Cannabis in Canada’s Jason Wilcox. Kamermans, once known as “Canada’s top medical marijuana doctor,” discusses the challenges he faced in his attempts to ease patients’ suffering.
Kamermans, a physician in the small community of Coe Hill, ON, signed over 4000 Health Canada forms for legal cannabis prescriptions “required to let patients consume or grow an otherwise illicit plant. At the time, just 13,000 of the forms had been signed in total across the country.”
Adam Greenblatt of the Medical Cannabis Access Society has said that Dr. Kamermans “changed the landscape of medical marijuana in Canada.”
The Ontario Provincial Police arrested the doctor and charged him with multiple counts of fraud, forgery and money laundering.
His patients reached far beyond Coe Hill. He was known to have lineups at his clinic. Halifax RCMP charged him with two counts of attempted trafficking. But, despite he admission that he made nearly $500,000 from the practice, he truly believed he was providing people with the care they needed, and could not get elsewhere.
Kamermans and his wife Mary Kamermans will go to trial in 2015 “in relation to fraudulent endorsement of Health Canada’s medicinal marijuana documents in Ontario, New Brunswick, Quebec and British Columbia, between January 2011 and April 2012.”
In this frank and revealing conversation with Jason, the two discuss the ethics and morality of Dr. Kamermans actions, and how his story is indicative of a larger issue at hand. They also touch on the hypocrisies and bureaucracies of government and how they are destructively counter to the needs of the patient.