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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Cannabis may be legalised - for medicines
Sky News Thursday 22 Mar 2001 Those growing and smoking cannabis to relieve health problems should not be prosecuted, according to peers, who pressed for speedier use of the drug in medicines. The Home Office confirmed the Government was willing to change the law so that cannabis may be legalised for medicinal use. The move came after the House of Lords select committee on science and technology on Thursday recommended cannabis be legalised for use in medicines and by those suffering multiple sclerosis. "If clinical trials into cannabis are successful and lead to a medical preparation which is approved by the Medicines Control Agency (MCA), the Government...would be willing to amend the misuse of drugs regulations to allow the prescription of such a medicine," a Home Office spokesman said. But the Lords report also called for research into developing cannabis-based medicines to be fast-tracked. Peers accused the drugs licensing body, the Medicines Control Agency (MCA), of delaying the development of cannabis-based drugs and of being influenced by the stigma attached to the substance. The report asys the MCA has not adopted a "positive" approach to the issue, despite evidence of the medical use of cannabis over hundreds of years. Peers feared the MCA's insistence on new data on the drug's toxic side effects could delay the development of drugs by up to three years. "In the absence of a viable alternative medicine - and though we would not encourage smoking of cannabis - we consider it undesirable to prosecute genuine therapeutic users of cannabis who possess or grow cannabis for their own use," the report concluded. "This unsatisfactory situation underlines the need to legalise cannabis preparations for therapeutic use." There were 89,000 prosecutions involving cannabis in 1998, but the numbers involving people using it for therapeutic purposes are unknown. Two major trials into its therapeutic uses were recently given grants worth £1.5 million by the Medical Research Council. In evidence to the Lords hearing, Home Office minister Charles Clarke said the Government would not stand in the way of a MCA-approved cannabis-based drug being prescribed by doctors. The report said: "In effect, the Minister assured us that once a safe, effective, cannabis-based medicine had been licensed by the MCA, the Government would actively co-operate in permitting it to be prescribed." Claire Hodges, a multiple sclerosis sufferer and a member of the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, said: "The report is recognising that there is a problem and we welcome that. "At the moment, the law is a nonsense. People are prosecuted for using something that eases their pain and distress, which is appalling."
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