Cannabis

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, for initiating this debate. I just want to say something about the case of a little boy. I think that some of us have heard from his grandmother but I shall explain the case briefly.

He has a very rare condition—which I think is called non-inherited genetic mutation in the PCDH19 gene—for which so far only a steroid treatment is effective. This is not suitable for long-term use because of the serious health consequences. It is very likely that whole-plant medical cannabis will work and will be without particular side-effects. To get such medical cannabis, the family of the six-year-old boy would have to travel to a country where it is legal for doctors to prescribe medical cannabis. There is a product under test called Epidiolex. It is a cannabis-based product but is not yet available and is subject to a long testing regime, which may be too long for this little boy. There is a need to move quickly to permit medical cannabis to be given to this little boy under medical management.

I now turn to the wider issue of cannabis for people with MS. I should declare an interest in that a member of my family has MS. We have had an excellent briefing from the MS Society, which says that 22% of people with MS have tried cannabis. I only know that a consultant thinks that every one of his patients has tried cannabis, not 22% of them, and I put that to the MS Society.

There is a product called Sativex that might do the business but which is not available to NHS patients, although it should be in Wales. The problem is that there is a dangerous version of cannabis known as skunk. People who are buying it on the illegal market are liable to get skunk, which I understand is not desirable, whereas ordinary cannabis is okay. By making the whole thing illegal, we are encouraging people to go to dealers, who are liable to give them the dangerous stuff rather than the helpful stuff.

Some doctors say that there is no evidence that cannabis is helpful to people with MS. I have a simple answer to that. If a person suffering from a medical condition like MS feels that cannabis is helpful, surely that is enough evidence. I am not anti-scientific and I understand the noble Lord’s comments, but if a patient feels that it is helpful, then by definition it must be. That is the case for me.