Medical Cannabis: Alleviation of Health Conditions

Mary Glindon Excerpts

Thursday 4th November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Mary Glindon (North Tyneside) (Lab)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Christine Jardine). I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing this debate, which, as everyone has said, is yet another debate on the same issue. Three years on from when we had such hope, it is disappointing that we find ourselves still here.

I am going to speak yet again about one of my constituents, a very brave and formidable woman who is known to many in the House, because she has been courageously campaigning for the medical use of cannabis by highlighting the problems she has faced in recent years to access the drug Bedrocan. Lara Smith is a wife and the mother of three children. She was a paediatric nurse and a county fencing coach before her health deteriorated because of cervical and lumbar spondylosis. For over 20 years, she has had 35 different medications, as well as a number of operations for her condition. Unfortunately, she has been left with permanent nerve damage, limited mobility and a constant, annoying and debilitating tremor in her right hand. Her quality of life has been completely impaired. That is not just because of her medical condition, but because of the awful side effects of the drugs she has been prescribed over all those years. This has meant that Lara was not able to be the full-time mother that she wanted to be to her daughters and son.

Fortunately, Lara’s pain management consultant in the north-east prescribed Bedrocan, and the transformation was such that she was able to come off all the other medications. Her young family said that they felt they had their mam back. The downside was that for a time, Lara could access the drug only by travelling to a Dutch pharmacy to collect it on a private prescription. I have said it before, so I will not go into it again, but she made that arduous journey every three months, bearing in mind the pain she was in. She had to notify full details of her prescription and her travel to Border Force each time. The costs of the medication and travel were very expensive for her family, but they thought that the sacrifice was worthwhile, because of the difference the drug made to Lara.

A couple of years ago, I was successful in raising the issue at Prime Minister’s questions. I received a response from the appropriate Minister at the time, who said that

“there should be no barriers to patients getting access to the appropriately prescribed medicine. The Department of Health and Social Care…has been working closely with suppliers and NHS procurement pharmacists to ensure that prescribed CBPM are available when needed.”

If only that were the case.

Fortunately, Lara no longer has to travel to Holland for her drugs—they are prescribed on a private prescription—but her consultant has unfortunately been unsuccessful in obtaining an individual funding request for her, which is a great disappointment to us all. That is because unfortunately the Northumbria trust—it is a well-respected and well-known trust in many ways, and I always support our trust for a lot of the good things it does, but I am rather frustrated in this instance—followed guidelines that do not advocate the use of cannabinoids, citing a lack of evidence for effective pain relief, because of the difference in the trials put forward to prescribe the drugs, and we have already heard about that issue. On that score, there has been no progress. Perhaps the biggest irony of all is that the trust advocates and allows the prescription of synthetic cannabinoids. For Lara’s drug, a synthetic cannabinoid is £588 a month and unfortunately leaves her quite ill; she pays £100 less for her private prescription. Such a state of affairs seems ludicrous.

There is nothing much I can add to what has been said today. All the speeches are always passionate, and Members speak with such knowledge on the subject—knowledge that has had to be acquired over all the years there has been the fight to win the case. I know that the new Minister, having worked with her on all-party parliamentary groups, is compassionate and knowledgeable, so we put great hope in her that we will see some progress after today’s debate and the other debates that have gone before. I wish her the best of luck in taking this forward, and I am sure she knows we are all behind her. We hope there will be change for the adults and children whose quality of life needs to be improved and can easily be improved if some changes are made in law.