The heartbreaking stories of and highlight the ridiculous and cruel situation that parents of children with severe epilepsy are put in by the UK’s outmoded policy on cannabis medicines. Parents of both boys say cannabis oil is crucial to controlling fits but have faced official prohibition, including confiscation. Only now are government ministers talking about a rethink.
This is a long-running injustice. Cannabis was a medicine in the UK until 1971 when it was made illegal by the Misuse of Drugs Act. The reason given was that cannabis was becoming a drug of misuse and that two London GPs campaigning for its recreational legalisation were prescribing it with the intent that patients smoke it for pleasure.
The GPs were, quite reasonably, struck off, but the enduring ban on cannabis is problematic for two reasons. First, it failed to reduce cannabis use, because in the decades since the ban the number of cannabis users has increased over 20-fold. Second, it severely impeded clinical research.
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There is a lot of evidence from other countries that cannabis preparations can have a wide range of therapeutic effects, . The ban on cannabis has effectively stopped UK clinical research on this anti-epilepsy effect despite – a powerful anti-epilepsy agent that has no psychoactive activity but for historical reasons falls foul of the act.
Schedule 1 drug
The problem is that under UK law, cannabis products are , the most stringently controlled, on the assertion that they have no medical value. It was obvious at the time that this was incorrect, but in the succeeding years all requests to the Home Office to review the status of cannabis have been refused or ignored on the grounds that the ban was essential to prevent the harms from recreational use.
In contrast, opioid painkillers such as morphine are in schedule 2, which allows use for treatment, despite more than 1000 recreational deaths per year. This presents us with the fundamental Catch 22 of cannabis research; the claim it has no medical use is perpetuated because medical research is almost impossible because cannabis is in schedule 1. So, ministers can still claim it has no proven medical value.
There is an even more perverse aspect to the current epilepsy cases: the cannabis preparations used are almost certainly not psychoactive in the sense that tetrahydrocannabinol (d9THC) – the agent of cannabis commonly associated with its high – is. In Billy Caldwell’s case his seizures were largely brought under control by the use of cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive and legal product of the cannabis plant. But the final complete control of his fits required the addition of cannabis oil. This extract of the cannabis plant contains d9THC and THCV, both of which are controlled under Schedule 1 of UK law.
The UK drugs act doesn’t have any allowance for dose – even a single molecule is illegal. In Billy’s case the dose of d9THC was 2 milligrams and would have little if any psychoactive effects.
These children have been denied a life-saving treatment simply because the UK has put the fear of cannabis as a recreational drug above the value of cannabis as a treatment. Temporary reprieves, such as permitting 20 days of cannabis oil treatment for Billy, are all well and good, but what is really needed is reform of the law. Let’s hope turns into action.
