It’s been five years since medical cannabis became available for prescription on the NHS. But from eye-watering prescription costs to supply chain issues, problems abound – and those in pain are turning to their local dealer. So, who is benefiting from the UK’s cannabis laws?
It’s8amonaTuesdaymorningwhenthealarm sounds in the bedroom of Adrienne’s London flatshare. As she blinks open her eyes, the 24-year-old account executive tugs at the handle of her bedside cabinet. Beyond the foil of a paracetamol packet and the nozzle of a lavender pillow spray, her fingers feel their way to a tiny white bottle. She presses the pipette, measuring out the correct dose – perfected over months of trial and error – before syringing a few drops of cannabis oil beneath her tongue. It smells like grass – and tastes as woody as the moss on a forest floor. She lets the liquid sit for a few moments before throwing off her duvet and hauling herself out of bed ahead of another working day.
Read the word ‘cannabis’ and you can almost smell the always earthy, sometimes sickly funk. But while even the most health-conscious can recall the furtive tokes of teenage parties, it’s increasingly being used therapeutically. With the peak still years away, one report forecasts that the global medical marijuana market, valued at just shy of $10bn in 2022, will reach $54bn by 2030*. The motivation for taking it to relieve symptoms – rather than to laugh uncontrollably before ordering an extra-large Domino’s – vary. Some use it to soothe the impact of a searing migraine, others to dial down the nausea that accompanies a chemotherapy session, to reduce the likelihood of an epileptic seizure or, like Adrienne, to make the agony of an endometriosis flare-up more manageable. What’s more, there’s a good chance they’re doing so legally.
Medical cannabis became legal in the UK – and available for unlicensed prescription through a specialist NHS doctor – in November 2018, if you can get it. And it’s a big ‘if’. From the tiny number of conditions for which the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has now licensed cannabis-based medications to a hesitancy among doctors to write prescriptions, it’s notoriously difficult to access. As a result, spiking demand is either being met by the for-profit medical world or the neighbourhood dealer. Meanwhile, some scientists caution that hype is being used to fuel a nascent market before enough robust data has been gathered. And so, five years on from the legalisation of medical cannabis, who exactly is benefiting?
Grass roots
Before cannabis oil became an integral part of her morning routine, Adrienne’s endometriosis symptoms would see her often obliterated by five-day flare-ups: bedbound, barely able to eat and struggling to sleep. It was in the wake
