Editorial policy
Who publishes this
Know Your Script is an independent publisher. It is not a clinic, a pharmacy, a telehealth service, a producer or a comparison site. It does not arrange access to any medicine and has no commercial relationship with anyone who supplies one.
The publisher also owns other Australian websites covering road law and workplace law. Where a page here links to one of them, that link is disclosed on the page itself. We mention it because a reader is entitled to know who is talking to them, and because we would rather say it than have it discovered.
What we publish, and what we will not
We publish what Australian law does and does not say about everyday life with a prescription.
We do not publish anything about the medicine itself: no product names, no brands, no strengths or doses, no claims that a medicine helps any condition, no information about obtaining a prescription, and no patient testimonials. This is not caution for its own sake. We operate on the basis that advertising a prescription-only medicine to the public is prohibited in Australia, that the prohibition is drawn broadly enough to catch indirect promotion, and that it also reaches a publisher who causes such promotion. A site that drifts into product territory stops being lawful, and stops being useful at the same moment.
We have deliberately not cited section numbers for that in this page. The rule governs how we behave rather than telling you what to do, and we are not going to quote a provision we have not opened — that is the same standard we apply to every other page here.
Every page is screened at build time against a list of the specific things we will not say — brand names, strengths, claims about what helps which condition, testimonials — and the build fails rather than publishing a page that matches.
We want to be accurate about what that screen is worth, because it would be easy to oversell. It is a backstop against a careless sentence, not a guarantee. It catches the obvious forms and it does not catch a clever paraphrase; we have tested it against deliberately reworded breaches and some get through. What actually keeps this site inside the line is a person reading the page before it goes up. The screen exists to reduce the number of ways that person can be let down by a moment's inattention.
The draft system, which is the important part
Every page starts as a draft, and a draft is never published. A draft is built and visible, but it carries a notice saying it has never been checked, it tells search engines not to index it, and it is excluded from our sitemap.
A page becomes published only when someone has read every legal statement on it against the instrument it claims to rely on. That check is recorded as a date, and the date is shown on the page.
There are two kinds of check, and every page tells you which one it got.
Checked by us. We retrieved each instrument the page cites from the government register that publishes it, at the version named on the page, and read the sections in question. The page says so in a notice at the top, its date says "by the publisher", and the citation block says "publisher-checked, not reviewed by a practitioner" — so if you quote us, you quote that too.
Checked by a named professional. A credentialed practitioner has read the page and is named on it with their credential and registration number. This is the stronger claim, it is the one we are working towards on every page, and it is the only one that puts somebody's registration behind what you are reading.
We separated the two because the alternative was silence. Pages had been checked against the Acts they describe, carefully, and there was no honest way to say so — the only stamp available claimed a professional reading that had not happened, so nothing published at all. Refusing to publish work that was genuinely done is not caution; it is just a different kind of inaccuracy.
We do this because the alternative is worse than an empty site. Somebody reading a page here may be about to answer an insurer's health question, respond to a breach notice, or hand a document to a court. A confident wrong answer in any of those moments does real damage. An unfinished site does not.
Sourcing
A law firm's article summarising an Act is a source for what that firm said; it is not a source for what the Act says. Where we can only find secondary commentary, the page stays a draft and says so.
A page checked by a named professional must cite at least two sources they have read. A page checked by us must cite at least one primary instrument — legislation or a regulator, on the register that publishes it. The counts differ because they measure different things: the two-source rule is about how much reading a reviewer is putting their registration behind, while one Act read in full at a named version answers a question about that Act better than two of anything else would.
Sources are listed at the foot of every page with the date we retrieved them, so you can check whether the ground has moved since.
Dates, and what they mean
Every page shows the date it was last checked against primary sources — not the date the site was last deployed. If nothing on a page changed, its date does not move.
Published pages also have a maximum age. When a page passes it, our build refuses to run until someone re-checks the page. This is deliberately inconvenient: law about medicinal cannabis is moving in several Australian jurisdictions at once, and a site like this fails by going quietly stale rather than by being wrong on day one.
Authorship and review
Pages are written by the publisher. Where a named professional has checked a topic, that person is credited on the page with their credential and registration number so you can verify them yourself.
Where no such credit appears, none has been given, and you should read the page accordingly. We would rather show you an unreviewed page honestly than attach a name to lend it authority it has not earned — and for the same reason we do not describe our own checking as a review, or emit machine-readable markup claiming we reviewed ourselves. A page we checked says we checked it, and nothing more than that.
If you are a professional willing to put your name to a topic, the terms are here.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it or withdraw the page. Material corrections are recorded in the "Page updates" note at the foot of the page, with the date. We do not silently edit a page that people may have relied on.
Withdrawn pages are removed rather than left up with a note. A page that was wrong should stop being findable.
Money
We are paid referral fees for introductions to lawyers, brokers and other professionals. Those links are marked on the page and the arrangement is described in full on our funding page. We are paid the same amount whatever you do next, we take no commission on anything you buy, and no fee has ever changed what a page says.
We do not take money from anyone who supplies, produces or prescribes the medicine, and we do not accept payment to cover a topic or to cover it in a particular way.
What this is not
Nothing here is legal, financial or medical advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship. Publishing general information about the law is lawful; applying it to your circumstances is not something we can do, and in most of the situations on this site the circumstances are what decide the outcome.
Last checked against primary sources by a named reviewer: