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UK: Patients like me manage lifelong illness with cannabis. For us, the UK is a hostile environment Greg de Hoedt British Medical Journal Friday 27 Jul 2018 In 2010 I was told that I needed major surgery and chemotherapy or I would live two to five years before dying from malnutrition associated with short gut syndrome. For me this wasn’t an option. The side effects of chemotherapy can include all the symptoms of Crohn’s amplified, and potential impotence, leukaemia, and death. I was a mess. Pharmaceutical drugs like the immunosuppressive azathioprine and the anti-inflamatory mesalamine nearly killed me, causing nausea, vomiting, and foaming at the mouth. I had worse diarrhoea with blood and mucus than my Crohn’s had ever given me. Cannabis, however, drops my bowel movements from 20 a day to one or two; it takes away my nausea and chronic pain; and it gives me back the ability not only to want to eat food again, but also to enjoy it. My medical regime starts the moment I wake up. I vapourise four 50 mg doses of terpene rich cannabis oil to help my bowel function properly. This is repeated every three to four hours. I take between 200 mg and 400 mg of cannabis oil orally in capsules two to three times a day, depending on my gut comfortability and my body’s chronic pain level. Between dosing oil, I will also vapourise a variety of home grown cannabis flowers, some to give me more energy to complete physical tasks and others to help slow my mind by curbing the constant release of cortisol that I have. Daily I will consume between 600 mg and 2000 mg of cannabinoids Flare-ups return because of a lack of access to high quality cannabis—well grown buds with a high resin content, the resin being the part that contains tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD). Globally, high THC cannabis is referred to as sensimilla (“without seed” in Spanish); in the UK it is dubbed “skunk” and demonised by the press, politicians, and the public. It is hypocrisy that the Home Office licenses GW Pharmaceuticals to produce cannabis in the UK, including the original high THC skunk strain.1 The Dutch company Bedrocan’s flagship herbal cannabis is also 19% THC and less than 0.1% CBD. Scientifically speaking, skunk is medical cannabis. THC and CBD get all the attention, but a strain’s terpene profile can modulate the effects of the cannabinoids. Over eight years’ experimentation I’ve found four plant strains that I grow myself that work better for my symptoms than any cannabis I can buy illegally—but I had to break the law by growing hundreds of different seeds to identify which ones to keep. Other growers hold genetic copies in case I am raided by police who would destroy any plants they find in my home. Visiting the US allowed me to gain a patient’s perspective of how appropriate and efficacious the different states’ schemes were. The right to grow and find what is correct for the patient is fundamental, and providing facilities like testing laboratories to enable patients to speed up the process is a necessity. There is no reason the UK cannot regulate medical cannabis similarly. If I had waited for the government to enact laws that suit my needs, I would be dead by now. I am alive because I have refused to obey an unjust law. We cannot wait, we need the right to grow freely. While the Home Office has just revealed that it will allow medical cannabis licences, the condition list and licence fee prohibits access to most patients like me.2 We do not deserve to be classed as criminals and certainly shouldn’t have to live in fear of police raids because we grow cannabis to stay alive. Footnotes Provenance and peer review: commissioned; not externally peer reviewed. Competing interests: I have read and understood BMJ’s policy on declaration of interests and declare the following: I founded the UK Cannabis Social Clubs in 2011 to help patients access safe, high quality cannabis products through a self regulatory model. UKCSC now offers patients the facility to test their home grown cannabis products so they know what the THC and CBD content is, and can dose their own treatment. References ?Ireland T. Interview: the new strain of cannabis that could help treat psychosis. Observer. 16 November 2014. www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/16/new-strain-cannabis-treat-psychosis-schizophrenia-gw-pharmaceuticals-david-potter. Google Scholar ?United Kingdom Cannabis Social Club. Government permits doctors to prescribe “cannabis-derived” medicine. 26 July 2018. https://ukcsc.co.uk/government-permits-doctors-to-prescribe-cannabis-derived-medicine https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3287.full?ijkey=tj2OPmz7LUtz3O2&keytype=ref
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