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UK: Brits can get cannabis for £5 a day as groundbreaking marijuana clinic slashes prices

Tom Towers

Daily Star

Sunday 03 Jan 2021

EXCLUSIVE: Sapphire Medical Clinics got registered with the Care Quality Commission after medical cannabis was legalised back in 2018. It has drastically brought down the costs of its products over the past year

Sapphire Medical Clinics was the first cannabis clinic to get registered with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and has bases in several cities, including London and Manchester.

The drug was legalised for medical purposes in the UK back in 2018, but patients have long faced staggeringly high prescription costs – sometimes coming to several hundred pounds a month.

However, Sapphire has helped make access much more affordable.

Earlier this year, the company launched a Medical Cannabis Registry to analyse clinical information on patients and help provide them with the most suitable product.

Dr Mark Weatherall, Consultant Neurologist at Sapphire, told the Daily Star: “We started off just over a year ago, and we had an initial burst of people that knew about medicinal cannabis and had either been trying to get prescriptions from elsewhere or were waiting for it.

“Things sort of calmed down a little bit and then they started to build up, and then of course we had Covid, which kind of pushed everything back.

“The last few months, the interest has been picking up…there’s been a quite a bit of publicity around medicinal cannabis and then one of the sort of main issues that is changing, and I’m sure will continue to change, is the question of cost.”

After it was legalised, potential customers were priced out of medical marijuana, owing to a lack of production in the UK.

However, the market began to grow and many more Brits have been prescribed the relevant products.

Manufacturers have also started investing in cannabis production in the UK, which has helped cut prices.

Dr Weatherall continued: “People 12 months ago…would be paying probably upwards of somewhere between £500 and £1,000 a month for the product, which is an enormous amount of money.

He added: “Now the cost is down to a point where, depending on the product, for some people it may cost less than £100 a month.

“Obviously, that’s still a not inconsiderable amount of money for many people.”

A review by the clinic found the typical patient who required treatment for chronic pain would pay just £4.76 a day.

EMMAC, Europe’s largest independent cannabis company, is also trying to make medical cannabis more affordable for patients in the UK.

Rokshaw Laboratories, an EMMAC lab based in Sunderland, received the “Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient” of medical cannabis last month.

The plant is grown in Portugal and the THC is extracted in Spain, the BBC reported.

It is then exported to the UK laboratory where it is turned into cannabis oil.

Co-founder and managing director Ed McDermott said in a statement: “This is a ground-breaking moment for the UK medical cannabis industry.

“EMMAC’s complete control of our supply chain, from cultivation and extraction to manufacture and distribution, allows us to offer a consistent, reliable and high-quality product in the UK at a price point that has hitherto not been possible.”

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/brits-can-cannabis-5-day-23177677

 

 

 

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