Posts Tagged ‘NHS’
Future UK Drugs Policy must embrace NHS-funded medicinal cannabis, adult-use legalisation and legal regulation of all drugs
Adult-use legalisation of cannabis is the only solution to the huge problem of the violent, gangster-controlled drugs trade which now dominates our streets. Revenue from the £6 billion per year cannabis market is what funds activity in the smaller but much more profitable heroin and crack market (with meth starting to make inroads in the UK).
Current government policy supports the gangsters’ business model and is directly responsible for violence such as the murder of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, the record number of drug deaths, the proliferation of dangerous products, contaminated drugs, synthetic cannabinoids, street dealing, knife crime, county lines and ease of access by minors. Until the government faces up to the disastrous policy it has pursued for over 50 years, all these problems will continue to get worse.
Prescribed cannabis will never reach everyone who can benefit from it, even when it is available on the NHS. I am confident that the research now being conducted by the Cannabis Industry Council (CIC) will prove that cannabis can be funded by the NHS with a net gain as it will reduce use of other more expensive and harmful medicines.
I envisage a cannabis market which includes:
1. Prescription-only (POM) sophisticated cannabinoid medicines which have been through clinical trials and have a marketing authorisation
2. POM cannabis as flower, oils and extracts, unlicensed medicines
3. Over-the counter (OTC) low-THC cannabis extracts as food supplements
4. Adult use cannabis in all forms available through licensed retailers
5. Grow-your-own (GYO for personal use only
There will be regulations to ensure standards, quality and safety at every level. There will still be criminal offences for supplying to minors and for commercial activity which is unlicensed.
All drugs should be legally available within regulations which are proportionate to their potential for harm. The most difficult part of this is that alcohol will need to be much more tightly restricted. This is why it is the alcohol industry and its massive wealth which drives opposition to drug law reform. Its spending power on advertising in the media and its lobbying of politicians is a corrupt influence which causes massive harm in our society.
The number of stores selling alcohol should be substantially reduced. Limits should be set on the quantity that can be purchased, much the same as current restrictions on OTC medicines.
Heroin should be available on prescription subject to engagement in treatment. ‘Abstinence’ is an unrealistic and damaging objective. The aim of treatment should be to improve health and support a sustainable lifestyle.
Cocaine is the most difficult problem. On its own it is no more harmful than alcohol but taken with alcohol as it usually is, its potential for harm increases exponentially. Crack is a very dangerous drug, not so much addictive as compulsive. Until we find a way of dealing with it, it will contine to drive acquisitive crime with users having no concern about the consequences of their actions. The huge dilemma is that anyone who has powder cocaine can learn very quickly how to ‘wash’ it into crack. However, if we continue to prohibit cocaine we will continue to make the problem worse. We must find a way to regulate access that will minimise harm and for now, I do not know what the solution is.
MDMA should be available in a similar way to adult-use cannabis, manufactured to quality standards, properly labelled and with limits on the quantity that can be purchased.
Taken together these measures will greatly improve public health, reduce pressure on the NHS, massively reduce all crime and free up police to concentrate on real crime which has victims.
My Predictions for Cannabis in the UK in 2021
On medicinal cannabis, the senior clinicians and bureaucrats at NHS, NICE and the professional medical bodies will continue to do all they can to block access. Until key individuals are offered fat fees to run clinical trials they will continue to insist that this is the only form of evidence that is acceptable. They will continue to ignore and reject all evidence from overseas. The clamour from more and more patients will grow. The private clinics will boom but our political ‘leaders’ will continue to be impotent in the face of the vested interests of the medical establishment.
The Cancard will take off and police forces will welcome it as a sensible solution. More and more people will grow their own and cannabis will become completely decriminalised by default. Only if you’re behaving like an idiot or are engaged in large scale commercial grows and/or gangsterism will the police be interested. Again our political ‘leaders’ will be useless and too scared of the tabloid media and their bigoted, poorly-informed backbenchers to do anything. Meanwhile the cannabis trade will continue to drive county lines, knife crime, prostitution, modern slavery, all off the back of profits from cannabis but Boris and his buffoons will refuse to understand this or follow the evidence that legal regulation is the solution.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA), in collaboration with the big business lobbyists, The Association for the Cannabinoid Industry (ACI) , will succeed in getting all the multiples and major retailers to stop selling whole plant CBD extracts, which are what work and what consumers want. Dozens of small CBD companies who actually built this market will be put out of business by the FSA/ACI and hundreds of people will lose their jobs. FSA/ACI will continue to ramp up their false propaganda that CBD can be toxic despite a complete absence of any real world evidence – all this with the intention of pricing small, artisan suppliers out of the market. Nasty, ineffective, isolate-based products will come to dominate the high street. Despite this, whole plant extracts will continue to be available online and the FSA will discover that it can’t enforce its rules because its definition of ‘novel food’ doesn’t actually fit genuine whole plant extracts. They will bring prosecutions against some suppliers but these will fail once expert evidence is adduced.
The legal British cannabis market will continue to develop in faltering steps because of the obstacles inherent in the way the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is applied. The government is terrified to undertake the wholesale reform that is urgently needed because of outdated and ignorant attitudes. It’s so transfixed by the drugs issue that it won’t even make the small tweaks to regulations on industrial hemp, exempt products and licensing that would give a massive boost to business prospects. I can see no chance of any progress until the Covid crisis is over and ministers have more bandwidth to look at other issues. Even then it’s going to need some new blood in cabinet. Although Boris Johnson himself probably does have the instinct for reform, he is surrounded by third rate ministers, most of whom could never be considered progressive and are hardly visionary or ambitious thinkers.
The Birch-Moore cartel will continue to try and monopolise the entire British cannabis space. Paul Birch, the multimillionaire stoner who landed a fortune from shares in his brother’s business, provides the cash and Steve Moore, former architect of David Cameron’s damp squib ‘Big Society’ project, runs the show. Volteface, Centre for Medicinal Cannabis, the ACI, Hanway Associates, Familes4Access are all different faces of the same core team, all characterised by generous funding, a young, aggressive team and an arrogant disdain for everyone else in the market. Birch’s money has definitely brought some welcome benefits and was the missing ingredient in achieving the media coverage which led to the legalisation of medicinal cannabis in 2018. They took ideas and policies developed by other groups and added a well-funded PR operation because the reality is that however important your message, without the hard cash you just don’t get coverage on daytime TV and the main news programmes. Aside from causing great division, particularly amongst the families campaigning for their epileptic children, the negative and malevolent aspects of their work is best demonstrated by the ACI’s manipulation of the CBD market and bullying of many small businesses.
I’m hopeful that at least in Scotland, which has the worst drug deaths record in Europe, there will be some progress on dealing with problematic hard drug use and its consequences. The heroic actions of Peter Krykant, who is illegally running a mobile drugs consumption room in Glasgow and saving lives every day, have had a big impact. This man deserves every bit as much praise as Captain Tom, Marcus Rashford or anyone else who has engaged in altruistic campaigning in 2020. He deserves a knighthood. As I write this, the latest reports suggest Nicola Sturgeon might even defy the dinosaurs in Westminster and fund appropriate harm reduction measures which are so desperately needed.
Until our political ‘leaders’ wake up to the fact that the entire criminal drugs market and the tens of billions it costs the UK are driven by the prohibition of cannabis there will be no real progress either on reducing the cost or improving public health. The kids who are being stabbed on London’s streets, the young people who are trafficked and the vulnerable hard drug addicts who are being cuckooed as part of county lines dealing, it all starts with the criminal trade in cannabis. That’s where the money comes from and until the market is taken away from the gangsters and properly regulated, things will only get worse.
Although we’ve all despaired about some aspects of the US political system, the progress on cannabis, even in Republican states, shows what real democracy can achieve. Local ballots have forced reluctant and often hostile politicians to comply with what the people want and make cannabis legally available. The Biden-Harris team have promised federal decriminalisation and expungement of criminal records for all non-violent cannabis offences. I think this will happen. Even if the Republicans retain control of the Senate this issue has built up a head of steam that won’t be stopped. Remarkably, the one issue that transcends the terrible divides in American politics is cannabis. If the Senate goes Democrat we could see much more far-reaching change. And once the federal law on cannabis changes, you watch all the slimeball politicians throughout the rest of the world pretending that’s what they wanted all along.
Overall, I am optimistic. Hopefully, as we head through summer and into autumn next year, Covid will be behind us, we’ll all be back to earning a proper living and a lot closer to enjoying our cannabis in freedom, for pleasure, medicine or both. My very best wishes and the compliments of the season.
The Truth About Why The NHS Is Refusing to Prescribe Medicinal Cannabis
The reason it is impossible to get medicinal cannabis prescribed on the NHS is not really about doctors’ clinical judgement. There are a growing number of doctors that do want to prescribe but they are being blocked by NHS bureaucrats and the senior clinicians that are responsible for drafting professional guidelines.
Although they aren’t law, these guidelines are what NHS Trusts rely on when they refuse to provide funding. And this is a huge problem, not just for people in pain who can’t get a medicine that they know works, but for the fundamental nature of our democracy and government. The NHS medical establishment is defying the will of Parliament. It is through Parliament that we make policy in this country and MPs have decided that medicinal cannabis should be made available.
This decision was made by Parliament based on medical evidence from around the world that millions of people gain great benefit from cannabis. Of course, the potential side effects were considered and will have been compared with the side effects of other medicines, particularly the highly addictive and life-threatening nature of opioids. Although you wouldn’t know it from all the scaremongering, there are no case reports anywhere in the world of patients receiving cannabis under medical supervision coming to any significant harm. There is no doubt that cannabis is safe as a medicine. Those opposed to it, usually with vested financial interests, are trying to second guess and undermine a decision that has already been made, often with spurious claims of harms caused by smoking it in its most potent form as a recreational drug.
It’s time that the medical establishment complied with the law. That doesn’t mean taking instructions from politicians, it means working constructively to deliver what has been decided, not finding excuse after excuse and being as obstructive as possible.
The senior clinicians responsible for drafting the guidelines, from the Royal Colleges and other professional bodies, notably the British Paediatric Neurology Association (BPNA), are the same people who have failed to provide up-to-date medical education on the endocannabinoid system. This is the system through which cannabis exerts its therapeutic effects and is now known to be the largest and most fundamental neurotransmitter system in the body. Yet it is barely covered at all in any UK medical school. These same people are also responsible for running and supervising the clinical trials that pharmaceutical companies use to prove the safety and efficacy of their new products. For this they receive very substantial fees and long-running sponsorship for their institutions. The conflict of interest is obvious, yet is being entirely overlooked.
Professor Finbar O’Callaghan of the BPNA has single-handedly obstructed NHS access to cannabis by hundreds of children with epilepsy that conventional treatment does not help. He describes his professional interests as having “particular emphasis on epidemiology and clinical trials“. If a cannabis-based medicine for paediatric epilepsy was to be trialled, Professor O’Callaghan would very likely be hired for it. So it’s hardly surprising that he is opposed to any medicine that hasn’t been through a clinical trial! It’s worth repeating – the conflict of interest is obvious, yet is being entirely overlooked.
Vested interests mean many doctors prefer to prescribe unlimited quantities of opioids, benzodiazepines and senior clinicians are more focused on earning fees from clinical trials than looking at evidence that is already available. We have a regulatory system which is designed by pharma, for pharma, administered by ex-pharma employees and cannabis is a threat. When the UK eventually gets a domestic cannabis production industry, prices will plummet and we will have a safe, cheap, palliative medicine that can help with many conditions.
Most of the 1.4 million people in the UK already using medicinal cannabis are still breaking the law. This is astonishing when you think our Parliament acted two years ago to ensure they didn’t have to! This is all down to a combination of arrogance and ignorance in the far-too-hallowed halls of our oldest medical institutions. Like it or not, medicinal cannabis is now legal and is going to take its rightful place as a first choice medicine in Britain. Let’s put aside the prejudice, put patients’ interests first and start delivering the enormous benefits it can offer.
Doctors Are Frightened Of Cannabis. It Challenges Conventional Medicine And Threatens Their Status.
Professor Andrew Goddard and Professor Finbar O’Callaghan at the Health and Social Care Committee, 26th March 2019
The British medical establishment is behaving like a spoilt child that doesn’t understand the rules of a new game.
The irony is that it’s actually a very old game that went out of fashion just a century ago despite thousands of years of practice. The wisdom accumulated across those many years has been dismissed by simplistic, reductionist, allopathic medicine and its return is being driven by patients – real benefit that real patients experience in real life, surely the most important criterion of all.
The doctors responsible for drafting the medicinal cannabis guidelines from the Royal College of Physicians and the British Paediatric Neurology Association have failed patients. Either through error or design they have overlooked the evidence of safety and efficacy that is widely available. They say there is ‘no evidence’ when what they mean is there is no evidence that suits them. For some reason they regard medical practice in Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain or Israel as not applicable to the UK. Their guidelines are not based on evidence but on the disregarding of evidence and they are merely the opinion of doctors who have no experience of cannabis at all.
These doctors who expect their ill-informed opinions to be treated as scientific fact are directly opposing the doctrine of ‘do no harm’. They stand by while scores of young children suffer life threatening seizures, while hundreds of thousands in chronic pain are offered only highly toxic, addictive and dangerous opioids.
Their arrogance, stubborness and self-serving preference for lengthy clinical trials from which they earn fat fees is both damaging quality of life and putting health at risk for millions of us.
Since Finbar O’Callaghan and Andrew Goddard gave evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee, over three months ago, neither of them, nor any of their colleagues in their ivory towers, have done anything effective to improve access to cannabis as medicine. They have decided that their opinion counts above everything else. They have no interest in what patients have learned from experience, sometimes over many years. They choose to ignore the expertise of thousands of doctors from other countries. They will consider the benefits of cannabis only on their terms. They continue to wildly exaggerate the possible harms and side effects and their position is fixed, stubborn and intransigent.
It was notable in the two professors’ evidence that they preferred only to talk about cannabidiol, where they could refer to the evidence of clinical trials. They didn’t want to discuss full spectrum cannabis at all. Why is it that physicians are so risk averse when surgeons are lauded and idolised for the most perilous use of the knife? They will slice into flesh only millimetres away from vital organs, remove sections of the brain which could kill or paralyse with the slightest error. Yet unbelievably, O’Callaghan actually does recommend slicing into a child’s brain rather than to administer a tiny dose of a very low potency version of a drug which 250,000,0000 people worldwide consume regularly with very few problems.
It’s all about ignorance and fear. O’Callaghan, Gardner and 99% of British doctors have received no education at all in the endocannabinoid system through which cannabis exerts its therapeutic effects and this challenges their status. In our culture, doctors have been treated as infallible, almost as Gods, never to be questioned, only to be obeyed. So a medicine that works, that is safer than virtually all the pills you can buy over-the-counter and has powerful, benefical effects for very wide range of conditions is a real threat to doctors’ status. It shakes their world and so they are eager to disparage it, exaggerate its risks, diminish its efficacy.
This is the real issue with cannabis. It gives medicine back to the people, literally for those who grow their own, and with it a great deal of the power and prestige that the medical profession has held over us.
Of course more and more doctors are opening their minds and learning. It’s the establishment that’s the problem, as it so often is in British life. It’s those at the top of the Royal Colleges, the professional institutions and the NHS bureaucrats at the intersection between money and medicine. These are the people that stand in the way of the most inexpensive, multi-purpose, safe, effective, easily tolerated medicine that we have.
Cannabis and CBD. UK and EU Bureaucrats -v- The People and Parliament.
For decades, public opinion and knowledge on cannabis has been way ahead of those in Parliament and civil servants in the Home Office and the Department of Health.
In other countries, governments have been more ready to update themselves on scientific knowledge and they are more speedily held to account through more effective democracies. At last, the UK Parliament has acted on access to cannabis for medical use as it should have 20 years ago. Both Canada and the Netherlands introduced legal access in 2001 and California even five years before that.
But the will of Parliament is being stifled and subverted by bureaucracts in the NHS and the Department of Health. As MPs are never shy to remind us, under our constitution, Parliament is supreme. That makes the conduct of these civil servants unlawful. They are being obstructive about the prescribing of cannabis. They need to be compliant with the law or they become guilty of maladminstration. We should have no more patience with this wilful misconduct. Their responsibility is to facilitate implementation of the law, not find ways to delay it because of their personal opinions.
The same goes for the Home Office which has done absolutely nothing to revise its cannabis licensing policy in accordance with the new regulations. Well-qualified, experienced, international corporations, willing to make multimillion pound investments in Britain to produce the cannabis-based products (CBPMs) which we need are being refused licences for no good reason. If the products are not available, how will they ever reach the patients who Parliament has decreed are entitled to access them?
For 50 years, the Home Office has run a systematic campaign of disinformation because it is institutionally opposed to cannabis. Until Sajid Javid, civil servants have thwarted the efforts of all minsters that have tried to introduce any drugs policy reform. Now he has to stand up against the subversive forces within his own department or someone has to fund judical review of the Home Office’s maladminstration of cannabis licensing. Just as in the Windrush Scandal, the Home Office maintains a ‘hostile environment’ based on senior civil servants’ personal prejudices rather than the best interests of Britain and now, the law.
CBD. Big Pharma Protectionism, Bureaucrat Box-Ticking or Both?
Many people are not yet aware of the meddling that is going on with CBD products. There is a real threat that they could be removed from sale within the next few months. This depsite their soaring popularity with the public and that hundreds, if not thousands of people are now employed in our burgeoning CBD industry.
CBD products are, in fact, whole plant extracts from low-THC cannabis which meet the criteria under drugs law to be exempt. They have become very popular because people were seeking a legal way of accessing the medicinal benefits of cannabis which have become widely understood, mainly as the internet has provided knowledge previously suppressed by government and media scaremongering.
Two years ago, the meddling began as civil servants from the MHRA, the medicines regulator, stepped in with heavy-handed threats to close the market down because of unlawful medicinal claims. To be fair, there was good justification for this. Medicines regulation is an essential function of government, otherwise we will have snake oil confidence tricksters selling coloured water as a cancer cure. So CLEAR acted and organised a response to the MHRA from the leading CBD companies. Now, the responsible and ethical companies have regulated themselves, stopped making medicinal claims and market their products as food supplements, just like vitamins and minerals than can help to maintain health and boost wellness.
So CBD companies have successfully negotiated their way through both drugs and medicines law but now the food police have stepped in with yet more problems. This time the civil servants objections are entirely unnecessary and unjustifiable but they are the most serious threat that CBD companies and consumers have faced.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) from the UK and its opposite numbers in other EU countries have placed cannabis extracts in the EU Novel Foods Catalogue, which is for products that have not been consumed to a significant degree in the EU before 1997. This means that without going through a lengthy and very expensive authorisation process, all CBD products could become unlawful to sell.
Why? When I met with the FSA and its novel foods team just over a week ago, it acknowledged that the purpose of the novel foods regulations was to ensure that food products and supplements are safe. It also confirmed that it had no evidence that cannabis extracts or CBD products are unsafe. So, on the face of it, this seems to be simply a matter of bureaucrats who want their boxes ticked, for no other reason than that is what bureaucrats do.
But the widely-held opinion from those in the know, is that what is really behind this are the vested interests of painkiller companies who are seeing a big impact on sales of their products. Even the World Health Organization has recently given CBD an unequivocal endorsement as safe and effective, whereas the toxicity of paracetamol, ibuprofen, other NSAIDs and opioids is now well understood.
You see, however CBD products are sold, it is an indisputable fact that they are purchased for their medicinal benefit – and that they work. This is a big threat to pharmaceutical company profits and so they are wielding their big stick. They tried through the MHRA to close down CBD and now they are trying through the FSA.
Exactly the same thing is happening in the USA. The recent passage of the Farm Bill has removed CBD from the Controlled Substances Act but now the FDA (which combines the functions of our MHRA and FSA) has stepped in and said it is illegal to sell as a food supplement because it is the active ingredient in a licensed medicine.
We Will Overcome
So a battle royal is starting. What the outcome will be is uncertain. It is complex and multi-threaded. Different strategies are being developed and varying ideas are being put forward as to how to deal with this threat. Many people now rely on CBD for their health and the imminent threat of it not being available is a danger to individuals and so to our entire society.
Whatever happens, I am certain that commonsense and the people will prevail. For a century, the use of cannabis as medicine has continued despite every effort from governments and vested interests to stamp it out. The same will happen with CBD. Even it it disappears from the high street, it will continue to be available online and if it can’t be sold as a food supplement, it will move into a new category.
Once again, it will take politicians far too long to wake up and out-of-control civil servants will try to pursue their own agenda which, I am quite sure, is under the corrupt and improper influence of big business. It will be challenging and very difficult but the people have dealt with these dark forces before and we will continue to do so.
While The NHS Is Failing People, Small CBD Companies Are Stepping Up.
Alfie Brocklebank
Canabidol CBD Oil
When Sajid Javid introduced the new regulations on cannabis for medical use last year, it brought hope to hundreds of thousands of people. Now the NHS is routinely letting patients down and refusing to provide the medicinal cannabis they need. The law no longer stands in the way but many people are in despair at the cruel and ignorant response of the medical establishment and NHS bureaucrats.
Not least the parents of Billy Caldwell and Alfie Dingley, the high profile cases of children with severe epilepsy, whose stories provoked the media outcry that eventually forced a stubborn government to take a proper look at the evidence.
Remarkably, small CBD businesses are stepping up when the NHS is letting people down and offering to provide CBD free-of-charge to those in desperate need. And these really are small businesses, little more than the internet equivalent of a corner shop. Even the largest of them is tiny compared to the financial turnover of the smallest NHS hospital. The owners of these small CBD businesses are funding these donations out of their own pockets and not asking for any PR or publicity in return.
Billy Caldwell is now approaching 100 days in exile in Canada
Billy Caldwell is exiled in Canada again because there is not a doctor in the UK who has the courage or the care to prescribe the cannabis oil he needs containing a small amount of THC. This is mainly due to the inaccurate and, it has to be said, negligent guidelines from the British Paediatric Neurology Association, which has recommended against prescribing even tiny amounts of THC to children. Its guidance is based on a misguided interpretation of evidence on the harms of adolescents smoking large quantities of high THC cannabis as a recreational drug.
Billy is OK because a consultant neurologist in Canada who understands cannabis as medicine has prescribed an oil with THC which is working perfectly for him. It’s just that he’s away from his home and his family. The doctors and NHS bureaucrats at the Belfast NHS Trust don’t care about that. Their primary concern is sticking by manifestly stupid guidelines to protect their own careers within the establishment structure.
Take note that the media, so keen to publish Billy’s story before, has lost interest. He’s still being reported as the poster boy for UK medical cannabis reform but the cruel irony is that the reform has failed him.
Another case in point is Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool. There, one consultant neurologist is prepared to follow the evidence, rather than sticking with failed pharmaceutical medicines. He has prescribed medicinal cannabis for at least two children with epilepsy but the hospital management has stepped in and cancelled them, refusing to allow his clinical judgement to prevail over their bureaucratic procedures.
Both children are in severe distress. Alfie Brocklebank has Tuberous Sclerosis Complex (TSC) which causes him to have many seizures every day, each one of which is life threatening. The medical director at Alder Hey said he did not meet the criteria to be prescribed medical cannabis so his parents started buying CBD at a cost which soon reached £170 per week. Alfie’s mother Ellen is a nurse, so she knew what she was doing. Alfie’s seizures stopped.
Ellen Brocklebank
But Alder Hey still refused to prescribe Epidiolex, the GW Pharma CBD medicine, and they wouldn’t help with the cost of the over-the-counter Canabidol CBD which was working so well. The family simply couldn’t afford to keep spending £170 per week on the oil.
See Alfie Brocklebank’s story here as reported by ITV News.
It was Billy’s mother, Charlotte Caldwell, who reached out to CLEAR. Canabidol CBD is a CannaPro Certified business, endorsed by CLEAR as an ethical supplier of legal, high quality CBD products. As soon as we spoke to Tom Whettem, CEO of Canabidol, there was no hesitation. He immediately undertook to provide the oil that Alfie needs at no cost – and there was no question of wanting anything in return.
Alfie’s mother, Ellen, takes up the story:
“Alfie is starting play school next week. Before we started the CBD this would not of been possible as he was just to poorly and having lots of seizures. Alfie going to a main stream play school with his sister is a huge milestone.
We are also slowly coming off Alfie’s conventional anti-epilepsy drugs as well. I’m nearly 100% sure we wouldn’t be able to do this if Alfie wasn’t on the whole plant extract CBD. The neurologist actually told me in his opinion Canabidol CBD is most likely to be more effective than the Epidiolex.”
A number of other CBD companies have now stepped forward and offered to supply oil to people in need who have been turned down for an NHS prescription. As a result, CLEAR, through its trade association Cannabis Professionals, is launching the CannaPro CBD Compassionate Access Programme.
CannaPro CBD Compassionate Access Programme
Applications should set out details of the patient’s condition, any experience with CBD so far and an explanation of the refusal to prescribe on the NHS. Please email applications to cbdaccess@cannapro-uk.org. All applications will be confidential and considered by a small sub committee of the CLEAR Executive Committee. Where we are able to recommend that a patient join the programme we will inform the applicant and introduce them to a donor company. Donor companies will be allocated in strict rotation according to the date they first offered to participate.
NHS Guidelines Offer People Who Need Cannabis As Medicine Two Choices. Go Private Or Carry On Being A Criminal.
Go Private…
…Or Be A Criminal
Following the new Misuse of Drugs Regulations, which came into force on 1st November, the NHS has issued guidelines on cannabis for medical use, both for clinicians and for the public.
The best that can be said about these is that they are NOT the law. In fact they are inaccurate, misleading and provide a seriously distorted picture both of the new regulations and of the evidence that is available on the use of cannabis as medicine. The crucial points are these. There are NO RESTRICTIONS on what conditions cannabis may be prescribed for. As well as oils, raw herbal cannabis may also be prescribed – for vaping only, smoking is prohibited. All the decisions are entirely in the hands of the prescribing consultant.
Of course, the problem is your consultant likely knows nothing about cannabis.
Action is being taken on medical education but it is going to take time. On the authority of the prescribing NHS consultant depends the funding to acquire whatever form of cannabis is required, in itself a difficult process as export licences will have to be obtained in the country of origin, either the Netherlands or Canada. So for those that can afford it, going to a private clinic could be the quickest and most efficient way of getting the medicine that they need. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly clear, it may be the only way.
For most people, already using cannabis as medicine, this means they will carry on as before, either growing themselves, sourcing supply from friends, acquaintances or dealing with the criminal market, dealers who cannot be trusted, product of unknown quality.
My advice? In the present circumstances, I really believe the state no longer has any moral authority to prosecute anyone who can show they are using cannabis for medicine. As the state has now recognised ‘conclusive evidence’ of medicinal benefit, the position has changed since the infamous R v Quayle case of 2005. I believe the Court would now support medical necessity as an argument.
So I advise you to grow. If you are able and have the space, it is the best option. For an investment of a few hundred pounds, purchase a fully configured set up of tent, light, irrigation and ventilation. Grow autoflowering seeds, just one or two plants at a time will meet most individual needs. With modern equipment, it really is much easier and more reliable than you might think.
This is a radical change in my advice and in CLEAR policy but as explained it is now fully justified.
But for those that can afford it, there is now a huge unmet need that surely private operators will step in to fulfil? It is a huge opportunity. It’s now perfectly legal to establish a private cannabinoid medicine clinic. This will represent the cutting edge of the new medical cannabis market. It will require highly specialised doctors who are on the GMC’s specialist register. With a few months intensive training in Canada or the USA, possibly the Netherlands, an admin team that gets efficient with the procedures necessary to import. This is the makings of a very exciting, profitable new, private medicine enterprise, charging very expensive fees.
I understand this will offend some but I believe it must be encouraged. This is what will push the NHS to catch up. Historically, advances in medicine have always happened in the private sector first. This is how cannabis medicine has prospered in other countries and it will be the same in the UK.
So, the problem is still far from solved. For some years, many people will continue to suffer unnecessarily but we have made huge strides and the war is won. Now we must make the peace.
How Long Until This Wicked And Deranged Woman Steps Down?
Can you be deranged and still wicked, or does an unbalanced mind excuse immoral and harmful actions?
In the case of Theresa May there can be no excuse. Her wickedness is persistent and has been since 2010 when she entered government as Home Secretary. She refuses properly to consider the consequences of her actions. She refuses properly to consider expert advice and evidence. Her explanations of why she persists with damaging policies are at best disingenuous but more often deliberately deceptive. She runs everything on the basis of her personal opinions, prejudices and with a myopic determination that some mistake for strength but is actually bull-headed ignorance.
Her continual evasion of proper answers on NHS funding must be her most serious deception. Yes, the NHS may well be seeing more patients, performing more operations, receiving more funding every year but the gap between demand and delivery is widening ever further. Does she think the electorate is so stupid as to be taken in by her deflection and refusal to answer questions properly? Perhaps she does. Many politicians seem to think they can get away with such bluster and deceit and there is so much fatigue over the nonsense these people try to palm us off with that, to an extent, she is correct. The electorate is not provided with proper means to hold our politicians to account because of course it is politicians that would have to implement such reform.
She is exactly the same on nearly all issues. She has successfully buried the child sexual abuse scandal, the misconduct of the British press and the refusal to continue with the Leveson Inquiry, the criminal complicity of local and national government in the Grenfell Tower tragedy. She is deceit and untruth personified when it comes to the Carillion scandal and all aspects of government outsourcing which is a deeply corrupt policy, not in the interests of anyone except politicians. And what other leader anywhere in the world, apart from the murderous thug President Durterte of the Philippines, has recently called for a continuance of the war on drugs?
Like most UK voters I am tired, cynical and fed up about the behaviour of our politicians who are entirely self-regulating, self-serving and have no interest in making themselves properly accountable. They have all forgotten that they’re there to serve us and not the other way round.
At two periods in my life I have been a member of the Conservative Party but I fervently hope that at the next election the party receives the biggest drubbing ever in its history.
I am also now firmly of the opinion that religion can play no part in politics and any politician who calls on their religious faith as some sort of qualification for public office should be disbarred for life. I consider that people should be free to pursue whatever belief they wish as long as they do not impose on or affect others but to bring such delusion into any aspect of public life should result in summary dismissal. This is the 21st century. Any politician such as Theresa May who proclaims her faith as a factor in the way she works is not fit for public office.
Hopefully the one thing Theresa May has achieved is to make the Conservative Party unelectable for a very long time. Even better would be that is is destroyed and the centre right of UK politics has to rebuild itself under a new banner. I am not optimistic about a Labour government. I admire Corbyn even though I don’t agree with him about many policies but it is the Labour MPs who concern me, most of whom are exactly the same as Tories, only out for themselves.
Never since the time of Cromwell has this country been so ripe for revolution. I don’t expect it to happen imminently but unless the younger MPs can work together to reinvigorate our politics then I do believe Britain will continue to slide towards some sort of violent uprising. We cannot, we must not and we should not tolerate any longer the weak, ineffectual and corrupt politicians that have led our country for the last 30 years.
This Time What’s On The Side Of The Bus Is True.
And can be backed up with solid facts and evidence.
The Daily Telegraph Misrepresents ‘Skunk’ Cannabis Mental Health Cases With Figure of 82,000. True Figure is 1,600.
Martina Lees
Two almost identical articles were published in The Daily Telegraph on 11th and 12th August 2017
Does smoking skunk trigger psychosis? And if so… why aren’t we doing more about it?
In both articles, journalist Martina Lees wrote that:
“…hospital admissions with a primary or secondary diagnosis of drug-related mental and behavioural disorders have more than doubled over the past decade, to almost 82,000 a year. Most are believed to be cannabis-related.”
This is a combination of wildly misleading manipulation of data and brazen falsehood.
Hospital Episode Statistics are maintained in great detail by the NHS using a system of coding called ICD10 – a medical classification list by the World Health Organization (WHO). containing codes for diseases, signs and symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury or diseases.
The specific code for ‘mental and behavioural disorders due to use of cannabinoids’ is F12. For the past 11 years, ‘finished admission episodes’ (FAE) for F12 have averaged 973, so the claim that most of the 82,000 are cannabis-related is simply false. (Unless of course, Ms Lees is going to claim she made a mistake.)
So where does the extraordinary figure of 82,000 come from (the exact figure is 81,904)?
Firstly, it is for all illicit drugs or ‘drug misuse’ including the following ICD10 codes:
F11 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of opioids
F12 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of cannabinoids
F13 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of sedatives or hypnotics
F14 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of cocaine
F15 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of other stimulants, including caffeine
F16 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of hallucinogens
F18 Mental and behavioural disorders due to use of volatile solvents
F19 Mental and behavioural disorders due to multiple drug use and use of other psychoactive substances
Secondly, the figure is not just for primary diagnosis but for secondary diagnosis. So the primary reason for one of these cases might be a broken leg or any other medical condition. The secondary diagnosis might be that the person was high on speed or any of the drugs mentioned. The primary diagnoses for all these codes adds up to about 8,000 FAEs but the figure is inflated ten-fold by the inclusion of secondary diagnoses. Why do this? Why have the figures been presented in this way? With what purpose?
If the whole premise of her article is about the mental health effects of cannabis, why does Martina Lees use this massively larger figure for all illicit drugs when the specific figure for cannabinoids is easily available? And if the purpose of the article is to investigate the effect of cannabis on mental health, why look at secondary diagnoses – except that it handily inflates the figure ten-fold?
Three other important points about this data:
1. ‘Finished admission episodes’ is not the same as people, its caseload, so those 1606 cases in 2015-16 almost certainly includes cases where the same person has been admitted more than once.
2. ‘Cannabinoids’ includes synthetic cannabinoids such as Spice and anyone with any knowledge of current affairs will know how problems with Spice have exploded in recent years. It is a fact that Spice is much more harmful to mental health than cannabis so the increase in F12 FAEs in recent years is almost certainly explained by this.
3. I’m not a believer in always comparing any data about cannabis with equivalent data for alcohol but it is worth noting, to put these figures into perspective, in 2015-16 the number of FAEs for mental and behavioural disorders due to use of alcohol was 44,491. As there about 10 times more people use alcohol regularly than cannabis, that means anyone is nearly three times as likely to be admitted for ‘alcohol psychosis’ as ‘cannabis psychosis’.
I have written to Martina Lees asking her to comment on this data and explain why she has used it in such misleading fashion.
Peter Reynolds 