Cultivation of cannabis for medicinal or scientific purposes needs considered management before it is rolled out as a therapeutic good. Since the publication in the Journal last year of a perspective on cannabis that stated: “Australia is behind the times on the medicinal use of cannabis”, there appears to have been a palpable change in...

This paper is an examination of the power of economists - and their constructed institutions - in the mobilisation of the US pharmaceutical industry in the 1970s, and their continued influence in how the industry controls our knowledge about drugs today.

Working out whether a treatment works, and for how many people, is trickier than it sounds. Here’s how you should go about doing it WHEN I had been a doctor for ten years, I enrolled in a postgraduate course in epidemiology and biostatistics. It was at a time when my brain could still absorb information...

Older people living in long-term care facilities often have multimorbidity, requiring many prescription medicines. However, polypharmacy in older people is also associated with hospitalisations, adverse drug events, drug–drug interactions, drug– disease interactions, falls, impaired functional capacity and cognitive impairment. This article suggests that reducing polypharmacy may reduce adverse events and maintain quality of life.

Abstract The aims of the present study were to illustrate and discuss the effects of the non-maintenance of equivalent prices when the comparators of pharmaceuticals listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Schedule (PBS) on a cost-minimisation basis come off-patent and are subject to statutory price reductions, as well as further potential price reductions because of the...