Subj:  UK: Lords call for cannabis to be legalised as painkiller



Date:  Sunday November 8, 1998 



Source: The Observer, UK





Lords call for cannabis to be legalised as painkiller 

By Andy McSmith, Chief Political Correspondent

Additional reporting by Nick Paton Walsh



The campaign to legalise cannabis will get its most powerful boost this week when a House of Lords

committee calls for the drug to be available for use to relieve pain.



A 70-page report of the Lords Science and Technology Committee urges a change in the law to allow

derivatives of the drug to be used legally. But it stops short of saying the drug, banned in any

form for more than a quarter of a century, should be permitted for recreational use.



Labour MP Paul Flynn, whose wife, Samantha, has endured a year of painful chemotherapy which he says

could have been relieved if cannabis had been legally available, said yesterday: "This is a major

breakthrough: I'm very pleased."



Gordon Prentice MP, secretary of the Commons MS group, which has lobbied for cannabis to be used to

relieve multiple sclerosis, said: "There will be a huge sigh of relief from thousands of people. The

question is whether the Government has the courage to act on good advice, because all its rhetoric

is anti-drugs."



The Lords committee findings will increase pressure on the Health Department, which claims the

evidence in favour of medical benefits from cannabis is too weak to justify a change in the law.



But the British Medical Association concluded last year that "individual cannabinoids have a

therapeutic potential in several conditions in which other treatments are not fully adequate". It

said there was "good evidence" that several cannabinoids had analgesic and anti-inflammatory

properties. They are also believed to help muscle spasticity and prevent convulsions.



The American Food and Drug Administration has approved the oral use of dronabinol, a cannabis

derivative, to help Aids sufferers. The BMA pointed out that no one has died of a cannabis overdose,

although heavy cannabis smoking can damage lungs and heart in the same way as cigarette smoking.



The Home Office has granted 22 licences for research studies involving cannabis, 19 of which were

still going on earlier this year. But Paul Boateng, a former Health Minister promoted last month to

the Home Office, told MPs: "We are not prepared to accept lesser standards in relation to cannabis

for the relief of suffering than would be applied to any other drug. That is the duty we have to

patients."



Doctors have been banned from prescribing cannabis under any circumstances since 1971, when the Tory

government passed the Misuse of Drugs Acts to discourage hippies.



The Lords committee spent eight months investigating the scientific evidence for and against the use

of cannabis, including 12 days interviewing expert witnesses. The committee is dominated by retired

scientists rather than retired politicians. Flynn criticised the committee yesterday for not looking

into the wider social and criminal implications of the anti-cannabis law. He said: "The report is

defective in that it deliberately excluded evidence that legalising cannabis leads to a reduction in

heroin use, because it takes away the need for users to go to the criminal market."



But committee chairman Lord Perry of Walton, former professor of pharmacology at Edinburgh

University - who refused to discuss the report's conclusions before publication on Tuesday -

insisted it had been a specialist inquiry that had heard from everybody with medical or scientific

knowledge.