Cannabis oil: why is it still illegal?

Britain’s drug laws are stuck in the “dark ages”, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. That much is clear from the case of Billy Caldwell. The 12-year-old has a severe form of epilepsy that once caused him to suffer as many as 100 seizures a day. His health was transformed 18 months ago, however, when a US doctor prescribed daily droplets of cannabis oil. He was then given the medicine on the NHS, before his GP was told not to renew his prescription. Last week, Heathrow officials confiscated a supply of the oil that his mother was bringing back from Canada. The seizures returned and he had to be rushed to hospital. It took days of appeals before the Home Office relented, allowing Billy three weeks’ supply as an emergency dispensation. It has now launched a review into the use of medicinal cannabis.

By handing back Billy’s medicine, the Home Office “implicitly conceded that the law has become indefensible”, said William Hague in The Daily Telegraph. That’s true in relation not just to medicinal cannabis, but to the recreational use of the drug too. The war against cannabis has been “comprehensively and irreversibly lost”. Maintaining the ineffective prohibition against it is only benefiting organised crime.

Whatever your view of legalising the recreational use of cannabis – Home Secretary Sajid Javid insists the ban will remain – legalising its medicinal use is a no-brainer, said The Independent. We already allow the use of opioid drugs for medical reasons. Cannabis oil – which contains such a tiny amount of the psychoactive THC compound you wouldn’t get high even if you drank an entire bottle – is legal in most US states and many EU nations, where it helps a lot of epilepsy and MS sufferers without leading to “moral turpitude”. That we are denying UK patients these benefits seems even stranger, said The Times, when you consider that the UK is the world’s largest producer of legal cannabis for medicinal and scientific use (we exported 2.1 tonnes of it in 2016). Indeed, the husband of Home Office minister Victoria Atkins runs the largest legal cannabis farm in the country. Yet our drug laws obliged officials to separate an extremely sick boy from the medicine on which he depends. What a ludicrous state of affairs.