Posts Tagged ‘National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’
Still ‘Insufficient Evidence’ for the NHS to Fund Medicinal Cannabis – or What’s it Really About?

The laboratory evidence for medicinal cannabis is through the roof in proof of efficacy and safety. The observational clinical evidence is also conclusive.
The evidence that is ‘lacking’ is that which fits in with the medical establishment’s well-established formula for making senior clinicians rich. The same doctors that write the guidelines are the ones who earn the very fat fees for running clinical trials and decide which evidence is valid and which isn’t. When the Royal Colleges and the professional medical bodies have worked out a way to get cannabis under their control, suddenly all the evidence will be OK. Then the committees and advisory boards that these same doctors sit on will turn on the NHS funding tap.
Until then, doctors are frightened of cannabis. A medicine that works, that is safer than virtually all the pills you can buy over-the-counter and has powerful, beneficial effects for a very wide range of conditions is a real threat to vested interests and doctors’ status. It shakes their world and so they are eager to disparage it, exaggerate its risks and diminish its efficacy.
Only when the medical establishment understands how its pre-eminence is going to be maintained, knows where fees and prestige are coming from, then cannabis will be ‘discovered’ by the NHS and all the benefits to patients and in reduced costs will follow.
The UK Is The World’s Largest Producer And Exporter Of Cannabis But Its Citizens Are Denied Any Access At All
This is the astonishing fact revealed by the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) in its 2017 report on narcotic drugs.
In the UK no one has any legal access to any form of cannabis except exempt products derived from industrial hemp, most commonly CBD oil.
Theoretically, the cannabis medicine Sativex is available but in practice, in England it is virtually impossible to obtain it except on a private prescription as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has recommended that it is not cost effective. In Wales it is available on prescription but doctors are first required to try highly toxic and dangerous drugs such as baclofen, tizanidine, gabapentin, pregabalin, even botulinum toxin or opioids.
The reality is that UK citizens are denied access even though their country is producing and exporting vastly more cannabis even than countries such as the USA, Canada, Israel, the Netherlands and Italy, all of which have legitimate and well regulated medical cannabis provision.
This revelation will further inflame the sense of righteous injustice in the UK. Against this background the UK continues to prohibit even medical use and is stubborn and intransigent in even being prepared to consider or discuss the evidence in favour.
How can the country which sanctions the legitimate production of more medical cannabis than any other in the world deny its own citizens legitimate access?