Cannabis News

While many countries across the world storms ahead on total reform of archaic cannabis regulation, the U.K. trails behind like a whiny toddler in a saggy nappy.

We know, with absolute certainty, that cannabis has immense therapeutic value. On 2nd December 2020, &nbsp;the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs re-classified cannabis and cannabis resin under an international listing to reflect this. There are now well over 40,000 studies exploring the endocannabinoid system and the potential of cannabis, most of which are overwhelmingly positive.

So far, 38 states and Washington DC have now legalised cannabis for medical use. Recreational cannabis is legal in 18 US states. Many EU countries have finally started to catch up, with the likes of Croatia, Denmark, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Luxembourg (among many others) now have legalised for medical use and decriminalised recreational use. In Spain and Italy, you can even grow a small crop for personal use. Countries further afield, like Uruguay (the first country in the world to legalise recreational cannabis) and Colombia are also well on board with reform.

In the U.K, however, we&rsquo;re embarrassingly behind. Although we technically legalised &lsquo;medical cannabis&rsquo; in 2018, it&rsquo;s still not properly available on the NHS. You might manage to get your hands on cannabis based medicinal products Sativex and Epidyolex (two drugs that have received &lsquo;Orphan Drug Designation&rsquo;, which provides ten years of protection from market competition by similar medicines, for the treatment of similar diseases with similar indications. So, cannabis.). Only 3 people (children) have received a whole plant product on the NHS.

Cannabis is not legal for recreational use in the U.K, at all.

According the powers that be, there&rsquo;s actually still &lsquo;not enough evidence to support safety and efficacy&rsquo; of cannabis for medical use. However, there is apparently enough for people who can pay up to &pound;3000 a month for a private prescription. But, dare to use recreationally or grow your own? Nope, that would make you a hardened criminal in the eyes of the law.

All this, even though there was never any weighty evidence to make it illegal (for the good of the people) in the first place.&nbsp;<a href="https://mellowpages.uk/editorials/history-of-uk-cannabis-prohibition-why-is-cannabis-illegal">History of U.K Cannabis Prohibition: Why is cannabis illegal?</a>

The law here is pretty clear cut &ndash; cannabis is illegal, unless you have a prescription and receive your cannabis product from a dispensary. But, sadly, it would appear that police forces up and down the country have yet to catch up with this 4-year-old information. Some legal cannabis patients have recently had their medicine confiscated, even threatened with a fine and charge, despite having all the proof of a prescription.

Clearly, a lot of education is still needed.

Speaking of education, this is another area where the U.K are failing &ndash; cannabis (and perhaps more importantly, the endocananabinoid system - ECS) is still not on the syllabus for any of our medical schools. Despite being discovered in the early 90s, and knowing that the ECS is one of the major physiological systems which regulates all bodily processes, this hasn&rsquo;t been deemed important enough to add in. Why? It&rsquo;s really impossible to say.

So, with all this in mind, are we edging any closer to cannabis legalisation in the U.K? It doesn&rsquo;t look like it. But, honestly, that means very little. Policy changes can (and do) happen in an instant.

The U.K government is clearly not averse to cannabis. In fact, looking at the numbers, some might say they&rsquo;re big fans! Even way back in 2016, before medical cannabis was legalised, the UK produced 95 tons of cannabis. Jazz Pharma (previously GW pharma) has just announced a $100 million investment into a 60,000-square-foot cannabis-growing facility. There&rsquo;s a 45-acre glasshouse in Wissington, Norfolk, owned by British Sugar, which contains hundreds of thousands of cannabis plants (again, grown for Jazz/GW&nbsp;Pharmaceutical). Hilltop Leaf have started work on a growing operation in Scotland that, according the Cannabis Wealth, has &lsquo;the potential to be one of the largest in the UK&rsquo;. Ananda Developments have started to cultivate medical cannabis for research purposes.

There&rsquo;s clearly a pretty solid awareness that cannabis is big business &ndash; one that the U.K is already heavily involved in. Still, all of our prescription cannabis is imported, apart from the plants used to formulate cannabis based medicinal products Sativex and Epidyolex.

But, just to re-iterate &ndash; it&rsquo;s illegal for you to grow cannabis in the U.K. Don&rsquo;t go getting ideas above your station now!

The reality is, none of us really know what&rsquo;s going on behind the scenes in the U.K. cannabis industry. There&rsquo;s a lot of talk about needing to educate our government and policy makers on the urgency to change cannabis law and, most importantly, open up access for patients. However, it&rsquo;s highly unlikely that these people aren&rsquo;t already extremely clued up on it all. It&rsquo;s not really an issue of not enough evidence for safety and efficacy, as they so often say. True, cannabis is a plant so can&rsquo;t really go through the &lsquo;gold standard&rsquo; randomised controlled trials ordinarily used to roll out new pharmaceutical drugs (although, it&rsquo;s worth noting that <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6089560/#R7" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">43% of new cancer drugs given a green light in recent years have received approval without supporting RCTs</a>). But, we do have reams of &lsquo;real world evidence&rsquo; which, which has been deemed weighty enough to base <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-study-into-covid-19-vaccine-dose-interval-for-pregnant-women#:~:text=Extensive%20real%2Dworld%20data%20shows,highly%20effective%20for%20pregnant%20women.&amp;text=The%20country's%20largest%20clinical%20trial,toda" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline">the rollout of COVID vaccines in pregnant women</a>.

What it&rsquo;s more likely to come down to is money &ndash; can more be made from keeping cannabis illegal in the U.K? We&rsquo;re making an awful lot through exports, plus private prescriptions, plus NHS prescriptions for &lsquo;first line therapies&rsquo; such as pharmaceutucal painkillers, anti-depressants, anti-convulsants, anti-seizure and anti-anxiety meds. Going by what we&rsquo;ve seen in other areas of the world where cannabis is more widely available, 25% of each of these stand to be replaced by cannabis, equating to billions lost by pharma companies.

But, they know this. So there&rsquo;s a huge surge in bio-tech start-ups and cannabis medicine patents now. When the dime flips, and bigger bucks can come from a wider legal cannabis industry in the U.K, we&rsquo;ll probably see a dramatic change very fast.

Until then, we&rsquo;re stuck in the dark ages.

Want to obtain a legal cannabis prescription? 

If you can afford it, it&rsquo;s very easy to get a private cannabis prescription provided you have one of the approved conditions. These include:

<ul>
	<li>
	Pain conditions
	</li>
	<li>
	Psychiatric conditions
	</li>
	<li>
	Gastrointestinal conditions
	</li>
	<li>
	Cancer symptoms
	</li>
	<li>
	Palliative care
	</li>
	<li>
	Rare skin conditions
	</li>
</ul>

There are a wide variety of clinics to choose from, all of which offer consultations online and delivery of cannabis to your door. There&rsquo;s also Project Twenty21 and Sapphire Access programme to consider, which offer subsidised cannabis medication in exchange for your contribution to their &lsquo;real world evidence&rsquo; data collection.

Is cannabis legal in the U.K? The lowdown on U.K cannabis regulation

Ruby Deevoy

Find your new favourite cultivar