Medical Cannabis under Prescription

Debate between James Cartlidge and Alberto Costa

Monday 20th May 2019 Commons Chamber

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who made a very good speech. It is always a pleasure to see someone fighting hard for their constituents, as we all are. He is right that all Members are mentioning similar cases, and I will also be doing so, but I first want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for the great passion and tenacity with which they have campaigned on the behalf of those who are suffering such pain. Sufferers are looking for a way to reduce their pain, and they believe that they have found one. That is the key challenge for us.

My case concerns a four-year-old girl called Indie-Rose. Her parents Anthony Clarry and Tannine Montgomery live in Clare in my constituency. Indie-Rose has Dravet syndrome and, as we have heard in other cases, suffers from frequent terrible seizures as a result of her epilepsy. Her parents have found that cannabis-based medicine reduces those seizures dramatically—they estimate by around 75%—but it comes at a huge cost, because my constituents have had to crowdsource thousands of pounds to go over to Holland, pay for the medicine and bring it back. I strongly feel that we must examine this issue because, as others have said, that situation cannot be sustainable, especially in a country that has a free healthcare system that is designed to help not just those in need but the most vulnerable in particular.

The compound that Indie-Rose’s parents have been purchasing is artisanal and unlicensed. It is a mixture of Bedrolite and Bedica, which of course contain THC, and the single greatest issue for me is that while there is evidence about the impact of CBD, there is little evidence about THC. When I first became involved in the case, I felt that I had a duty to understand it more and to appreciate why there was resistance in what we might loosely call the medical establishment to prescribing a THC-based solution, such as that which was already being given to Indie-Rose and which was successfully, in her parents’ opinion, reducing her pain and suffering. I organised a meeting to discuss the situation in April at Addenbrooke’s hospital with some of the most senior clinicians that one could hope to have in a room, all of whom were familiar with Indie-Rose’s case. We are lucky to have hon. Members in this House with serious medical experience, but most of us are not clinicians, and none of us is the clinician in the cases that we are talking about. We are politicians, so I wanted to understand better the barriers to the NHS prescription that my constituents were seeking.

At times in this debate, the situation has been spoken of as if the argument is about whether cannabis-based medicine should be prescribed at all, but it is clearly about the type of medicines that should be prescribed. There is clearly nervousness in the medical establishment about THC. We should not hide from that point, and there is perhaps a very good reason for that point of view.

[Alberto Costa (South Leicestershire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the points he is making are further evidence for why the conclusions of the interim report of the NHS’s review of the situation, as requested by the Secretary of State, should be published as soon as possible? The report will help us to identify answers to my hon. Friend’s points, and it may help my constituents Evelina Lukoševičius, who is two years old, and Maya Fairlie, who is seven years old, to access this life-saving medicine—if, indeed, that is what the review concludes.

[James Cartlidge]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. I would just be cautious about using the term “life-saving”, because this is about easing pain. These medicines are not cures; they relieve the pain of seizures. However, I understand my hon. Friend’s point, as we all did.

The meeting that I organised was instructive for me in many ways. Since then, I have obviously continued to correspond with my constituents to try to explain to them the powers that I have in this case and the next steps that they need to take. When this debate came up, they emailed to ask me to put one question to the Minister. Remember, they are not being prescribed THC-based compounds; they have been offered Epidiolex, which is a CBD-based medicine. They want me to ask whether any other children with epilepsy, or any other condition—of course, it is primarily complex epilepsy—have been prescribed THC-based medicines.

That information is in the public domain in the form of a written answer. As I understand it, 110 items—items, not people—of CBD-based medicine have been prescribed, along with 16 items of THC-based compounds, six of them on the NHS. That is an important point, as my constituents want to know whether others have been granted such medicines, and clearly they have. Where is the consistency? That is the confusion. Of course we cannot know the unique personal medical facts of each case, which must always be down to the clinicians, but we now know that THC-based solutions have been prescribed.