The only thing the new law does is let people smoke legally who were too honest to get their card with a faked condition.

The late Milton Friedman was a Nobel Prize economist who supported personal and economic freedom.
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Friedman: [edited]   You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society and tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. The majority of the public shares your concerns. The end you seek to achieve is good.

Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but not only demand. It is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels.

Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault.
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Drug use causes destruction and death. But, attempting to stop drug use causes even more. Millions are in prison for dealing drugs, drug dealers kill each other for the territory to sell drugs, innocents are killed as collateral damage, and drug users die from bad doses and contaminants. These deaths and imprisonments are mostly an effect of the drug war. Mexico is ruled by drug cartels with about 30,000 drug-related murders per year.

The decision is not life vs drugs, it is unfortunately and realistically life vs life. This can’t be a feel-good decision. Fighting the evil is causing more death and destruction than tolerating the evil. The experiment with alcohol Prohibition demonstrated this.

Pain Management specialists in my area are few, are most likely Boarded in Anesthesia, and won’t follow such patients (If they can’t stick a needle in it, then they have no treatment for them!) True Pain Management specialists would be totally overwhelmed if this was a requirement for prescribing narcotics.

That would also mean those Boarded by ER Medicine weren’t qualified to treat closed fractures because they weren’t Orthopaedic Surgery certified, couldn’t prescribe antibiotics because they were not Board Certified in Infectious Disease, couldn’t treat children because they were not Board Certified in Pediatrics, etc., etc.

Such is the stupidity of mandating board certification when the Boards themselves make no statement guaranteeing competence of the individual practitioner! They know that one can be Board Certified and incompetent, and competent but not Board Certified.

that aside, pharmacy boards are all about protecting the interests of corporate pharmacy and sometimes, the public. they don’t care about this issue in the context you posed. any pharmacist asking the question you pose would get, at most, a shrug of the shoulders.