Tag: britain

The long two-year battle is over for Billy Caldwell, one of the UK’s most famous cannabis patients. The National Health Service (NHS) has agreed to provide him with government-funded cannabis for the rest of his life.

Now 15, Caldwell became an international media sensation after his mother, also an advocate and participant in the industry, went public with the fact that the supplies she was trying to bring into the country to treat her sick son were confiscated by the government at Heathrow airport.

Even more intriguingly? The prescription that Caldwell uses is not produced in the UK but rather produced in Canada, imported internationally, and paid for by the NHS. That said it is not clear that this exact model will be duplicated by the Belfast Trust, who is responsible for implementing the care plan, for other patients. Or any other NHS trust for that matter.

What Is Likely To Happen Next?

That this is a precedent-setting case is obvious – but what is the precedent likely to be?

As a subtext to all of this is that the NHS has finally admitted that the products that are produced domestically by GW Pharmaceuticals are not going to cut it for a lot of British patients.

The question on the table now, however, is where should the bulk of this “other” cannabis come from?

Buy British?

The logical caveat of course is that if locally produced cannabis oil meets muster on the regulatory side, is this, finally, the birth of the home-grown British industry? The Caldwell precedent, combined with a widely predicted ruling from the Food Safety Authority (FSA) that errs on the side of sanity from a novel food perspective, is actually really good news. And logically, the answer to that question is from a cost perspective, the answer, surely, must be yes.

While the raw products may not hail from the British Isles for a demand that is likely to be enormous on both the medical and consumer side, there are in fact companies on the horizon, established in the U.K. who are absolutely in a position to step up.

The local production of cannabis and its extracts into both food and medicine is a hot topic, particularly in Europe and even more particularly post Covid.

With such developments, it is not inconceivable that cannabis is well on its way post Brexit, to becoming as British as well, tea.

For the latest developments on the European cannabis market as well as the UK, be sure to stay tuned to our post-Covid conference schedule!

Ah, the irony. After decades of resisting cannabis reform, the British government-funded National Health Service (NHS) has established plans to manufacture CBD oil itself. Why? To prepare for a clinical trial to study the efficacy of medical CBD on children with severe epilepsy.

The ironies are indeed large.

For starters, the once-vaunted and now struggling British NHS has also not managed to issue any prescriptions that approvers have passed through the gate. This has in turn forced legitimate patients and their families to turn to a variety of highly unappealing, expensive and in some cases, still illegal options.

The one company which has benefited from this situation, GW Pharmaceuticals, and for over 20 years, has been forced to lower prices on their own CBD-based drugs in the last year as the NHS has been forced to deal with the issue of cannabis reform. However, this is not yet low enough, apparently, which is why the government itself is in effect nationalizing production to determine efficacy.

It is not an entirely unprecedented move. The German government has essentially “bought” the first cannabis cultivation crop in Germany and is using this to drop sky-high prices that have been a feature of the legitimate market since its kickoff in 2017.

However, like the German government, the attention, noise and fuss are still “just” on the CBD market. The issue of medical THC is still a highly controversial one, and so far, at least in the UK, one that the government does not yet seem to want to address.

German Vs. UK Market Development

In Germany, physicians are increasingly approving cannabinoid drugs, even though there is still a highly complex interplay between government price and cost controls and the companies that operate in this space. There is high THC medical-grade cannabis being grown here – even though it is not enough to meet demand. Thus the export market.

Unlike the UK, THC reform was included in government plans. This does not mean that things are “good” on the ground in Deutschland – indeed there are many issues on the ground here. However, unlike the UK, Germany at least has admitted that THC has medical efficacy.

Where Everything Gets Weird

As just about everyone in the industry knows at this point, the fact that the European Commission is considering reclassifying CBD as a “narcotic” is sending shock waves through an already strange discussion no matter what the UK is calling itself these days.

One thing is very clear. Nobody is sure what to do about cannabis. It’s not a bird, and it’s not a plane. 

Stay tuned for more intriguing, if decidedly strange, developments.

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