Cannabis

Lord Mancroft Excerpts

Thursday 7th September 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, in a civilised society, one of the ways by which we are judged is how we look after those who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own: the young, the old, the infirm and the weak. Among them are those who have a particular condition or disability that cannot easily be remedied by orthodox medical care or modern drugs. But if we cannot help them conventionally, nor should we prohibit them from accessing less mainstream treatments if they believe that those treatments can alleviate some of their discomfort or pain. We all know why cannabis is illegal, and whether or not we agree with its prohibition—your Lordships will know that I never have—we can recognise the good motives of those who introduced that legislation and prohibited its use almost half a century ago. That happened some years after the proposal to ban heroin and cocaine was dropped by the Home Office. The Minister responsible agreed, after meetings with doctors’ representatives, to permit those drugs to be categorised as controlled rather than prohibited drugs so that even though they were recognised as dangerous and addictive, they could be prescribed by doctors because of their unique therapeutic value. I know a little about that because my own father was the Minister responsible for doing that in the post that my noble friend holds in the Home Office today.

At that time, no such therapeutic benefit was attributed to cannabis, which is why it was banned. Now we know differently. We live in an age of evidence-based policy, as the noble Baroness said. However, while there is scientific research that demonstrates the value of cannabis, such as that undertaken by Professor Raphael Mechoulam at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, perhaps more importantly there is overwhelming anecdotal evidence from many individuals, some of whom I too have met personally, that their symptoms can be alleviated by cannabis. We would be negligent and, as the noble Baroness said, cruel to ignore that evidence.

I hope my noble friend will not seek to resist the proposal of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, by advocating a long and complex process of drug trials. This is unnecessary. In November 2015, scientists in the United States announced the discovery of a drug that cures, without any side effects, hepatitis C—until then, incurable, untreatable and usually terminal. Some 300,000 people in Britain have it today. In less than three years, without any extensive trials, thousands of patients throughout the world, who until then faced an uncertain future, has been completely cured of hepatitis C because of the use of this drug. I have a slight interest in it because I am one of those who has been cured within the last six months, and I am immensely grateful to NICE for the decision it made to allow the prescription of this drug without any of the requirements to go through the usual years of testing required by the MHRA. So it can be done and it has been done.

Whatever regime Parliament puts in place will inevitably be circumvented by those who want to do so. Alcohol, tobacco and opiates are all controlled in different ways by the law but they are all abused in a way that the law does not permit. One cannot stop that. Arguably, the drugs that are most abused and cause the most harm are those that are routinely and quite legally prescribed by thousands of doctors, who should know better. So the argument that cannabis is uniquely dangerous and capable of being abused is not credible and appears simply obstructive for the sake of it. Let us therefore have no humbug today. Rather than looking for excuses to do nothing by citing spurious reasons from a bygone age, and thus needlessly prolonging the suffering of patients whose lives could be immeasurably improved, I hope my noble friend will use this debate and opportunity to make this tiny, reasonable and unique move—at no disadvantage to the taxpayer—and show the world that we are the civilised nation that we aspire to be.