Medical Cannabis: Alleviation of Health Conditions

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

It is a great pleasure to close for the Scottish National party in what has been a consensual and informative debate with a great deal of good sense and passion from all parts of the political compass and all points of the House. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing this important debate.

It is important that we take good note of the reality on the ground. Passing laws and changing regulations are easy for a legislature, but effecting change on the ground is deeply important for millions of the people who we represent and serve. I have a personal insight to this issue: nine years ago, I was diagnosed with arthritis. It is a family thing. We knew that it was probably in the post. It is well-managed and I am relatively lucky—Versus Arthritis is a great organisation with a lot of good support and advice—but what it has given me is a keen awareness that pain management and chronic medical conditions are life-defining for millions and millions of the people who we serve. Anything that can help alleviate those conditions surely needs to be properly ventilated and worked through for the benefit of those millions of people. Medical cannabis should not be held back by woolly sentiment and outdated thinking. I think there is still a job to be done to move where the state is on that.

I also have a constituency interest, in that in Stirling we host Sapphire Medical Clinics, which is Scotland’s first and so far only medical cannabis prescribing clinic. Since March this year, it has had great success, with upwards of 1,000 referrals of medical cannabis for people across Scotland with chronic pain, anxiety, insomnia and other conditions. That is not to say that medical cannabis is a silver bullet, but it does work for millions of people worldwide, and it deserves to go further. Those 1,000 patients are all part of the UK medical cannabis registry, which has data on 20,000 prescriptions UK-wide, so there is a lot of data being brought through. Sapphire also collaborates closely with the University of the West of Scotland on analysis and research into the efficacy of the treatments. There is a lot of data building, and that is where we need to evolve the thinking of the state in viewing these things.

Obviously I would prefer to see the devolution of drugs policy to the Scottish Parliament. I think we would make a better fist of it than has been made thus far, but there is a challenge to the Minister: let us do it properly and well. Let us make sure that this technology is brought forward. Pending that, there are a number of action points that could be taken, not least in the NHS’s report into the subject, which contains several good points and deserves to be higher up the agenda than it seems to be.

Does the Minister agree that bringing all cannabis prescriptions into the NHS drug dictionary would allow a much better assessment and analysis of the scale of prescription already in existence? There needs to be a change in tone from the Government about drugs policy. We need to view drugs as a health issue through the health prism, rather than the criminal justice prism. If we look at the issue in the right way, we will surely get better answers. I wish the Minister well and I have high hopes that she will agree that that is the way we need to look at it.

Medical cannabis does not work for everybody. It is not a silver bullet, so calls to put things into the NHS system are perhaps premature in some cases, but we need to ventilate that promising technology properly. It could help millions of people. For the people for whom it does work, it works very well, and it could work for an awful lot more. I wish the Minister well in taking it forward. If she does something useful and sensible for the millions of people who are suffering, she will have our support.