Cannabis

Paul Monaghan Excerpts

Monday 12th October 2015 Westminster Hall

[Dr Paul Monaghan (Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross) (SNP)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate, and I congratulate the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) on securing it. A debate about the regulation of cannabis to reduce harm is welcome. I will immediately declare an interest. For many years, I have had the privilege of being the director of the Inverness Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre. Cannabis has brought some relief to some sufferers of MS, and I am anxious to support those individuals. I am also the vice-chair of the all-party group on drug policy reform. That widely respected group has undertaken significant research into the medical and social use of cannabis, and its findings are, I believe, unassailable.

There are strong arguments to support the regulation of cannabis for social use, but I will focus today on the medical use of cannabis. I urge all right hon. and hon. Members to consider urgently the legalisation of cannabis for medical use. The many applications of cannabis as a medicine are impeded by its inclusion in schedule 1 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. Schedule 1 drugs are controlled substances considered to have no medicinal value. A simple change to schedule 2 would recognise the drug’s undoubted medicinal value and place it on a par with opiates. It would also enable research to be carried out into the vast potential for a range of medical applications and facilitate relief for thousands of people, including the many who suffer from MS and epilepsy who are not helped by other medicines.

Cannabis is already an important medicine. The utility of cannabis and its derivatives has been established through analysis of the treatment of a range of conditions including multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, numerous forms of chronic pain, glaucoma, and nausea and loss of appetite caused by chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Estimates suggest that some 30,000 people across the UK are at risk of breaking the law by using cannabis medicinally, but they do so primarily because it provides relief from chronic medical conditions and has relatively mild side effects.

There are a number of anomalies in the UK system. Sativex, which is a synthetic form of two of the main cannabinoids in cannabis, THC and CBD, is authorised in the UK as an extra treatment for patients with spasticity caused by MS. Sativex contains the same constituents as drugs classified in schedule 1 as cannabis derivatives, and it can cost more than 10 times as much as medicinal cannabis imported from Holland.

Cannabis’s schedule 1 status makes research into medical applications an expensive obstacle course. Such research involves a minimum outlay of £5,000 to cover licensing and security, and licence applications take about a year. In the UK, only four hospitals have been granted a licence to hold stocks of cannabis, although they can all hold heroin. It has been calculated that research into cannabis costs 10 times as much as, and takes significantly longer than, research into all other forms of drug.

It is worth noting that the recent Home Office report “Drugs: International Comparators” suggests that the severity of the cannabis drug control regime has had little impact on the prevalence of drug use. An adjustment to the UK control regime to give patients the right to medication that they believe works for them is unlikely to have any wider impact on the level of recreational cannabis use. Indeed, I would argue that no sensible argument can be mounted in support of the idea that medicinal regulation would impact adversely on other forms of illegal drug use.

The case for the regulation of cannabis for social use is primarily about ending criminalisation, reducing harm and creating separate drugs markets. Laudable as those arguments are, they are only tangentially related to the regulation of cannabis for medicinal use. That fact is evidenced in the drug’s regulation for use in many parts of the world. More than 20 states in the USA have provision for the supply of medicinal cannabis. In Europe, medicinal cannabis is produced in the Netherlands, and it is available on application by a physician in the following European countries: Italy, Finland, Switzerland and Germany. Recently, Canada also legalised the use of medicinal cannabis.

We must be clear that cannabis does have a legitimate medical use that is not recognised by its schedule 1 classification. Cannabis is, in fact, an important medicine with a legitimate role in treating a host of conditions including, as I have said, the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, epilepsy and various forms of chronic pain. There is mounting evidence to support its use as an effective treatment for Dravet syndrome, an extreme form of childhood epilepsy—sufferers have up to 100 seizures each day. Some families have reported that CBD is the only thing that has been effective in easing their child’s symptoms. Further research into this and the ability to access medicinal cannabis legally would be life changing for sufferers of the condition.

It is enormously important that we should be able to research the further potential medicinal use of cannabis. To do that, we need to change it from being a schedule 1 drug to being a schedule 2 drug and we need to do that soon. People could then be prescribed medicinal cannabis by a physician when appropriate. Patients who find the drug helpful for their condition would no longer need to break the law to obtain it and would have access to high-quality cannabis with monitored cannabinoid content. Such a change would greatly facilitate important research into the medical uses of cannabis. I hope the Minister will consider regulating cannabis for medicinal use. Quite frankly, our constituents deserve nothing less.