If you’d had medical cannabis at university, how do you think it would’ve helped you?
At uni, having medical cannabis would’ve made a huge difference to me in terms of not worrying where to source my medication and worrying about the quality of it and what’s in it, if it’s laced for example. I wouldn’t have had to worry about smelling of cannabis, some of the lecturers gave me some looks sometimes and I wouldn’t have had guilt associated with my medication use.
It would’ve made a huge difference especially when you’re medicating for anxiety, it makes a sort of paradox if you get anxious about using that medication. I feel 100%, a level of anxiety would’ve been reduced.
Would a cannabis prescription be considered the same as any other prescription or would there be more conditions attached to it?
Medical cannabis prescriptions are the same as any other prescription - the kind that my company does are private prescriptions and that’s the main type in the UK. There’s NHS prescriptions for three conditions – MS, certain types of epilepsy and CINV, which is chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting. Private prescriptions are way more widespread in the UK, I think the current estimate is like 35,000 or 40,000 patients.
The conditions for getting a prescription are to have any diagnosed condition at all, and to have tried at least two types of medication or therapy for it. That can also include refusing a medication, for example you get offered anti-depressants but you don’t want to go on them for personal reasons. This is because of something that is called an unmet clinical need – so if the licensed medications don’t treat all of your symptoms, then you have an unmet clinical need. There’s no specific conditions with it, you can travel abroad with it, you can drive with it, you can bring it into nightclubs and festivals.
Do you think this will remove some of the stigma surrounding cannabis and do you think this could lead to it’s legalisation in the UK?
I definitely think that widening awareness of medical cannabis will reduce the stigma attached to cannabis for everyone, especially for people using it “recreationally”, who will be medicating for an underlying condition that they don’t know they have, or for trauma, or loads of different things.
Identity exposure is one way of stigma reduction – when you see the range of people that are cannabis consumers. I’ve met so many patients that are 80 or 90 year old women that use it for arthritis, you meet businessmen who use it, students as well.
Another form of identity exposure is through medical associations. It’s something that both cosmetic surgeons and tattoo parlours have been done as well, they used to be very stigmatised when both first got popular. But through introducing things like having licenses for tattoo artists and cleanliness standards, and with cosmetic surgeons making it very clean and sterile. The same sort of thing is happening with cannabis at the moment – medical cannabis has a lot more tests it has to go through.
My belief personally is that wider private prescriptions will lead to NHS reimbursement – that’s the main goal. That will then lead to legalisation, because of the amount of people that consume it, how normalised it is, and tax benefits, things like that. Everyone should have access to it as a medicine, however they see fit. Recreational use is massively beneficial in terms of tax benefits, in terms of alcohol consumption going down, opioid consumption going down, and opioid deaths especially.
Where do you see GAP going in the future? What are your personal hopes for the project?
Before we introduced students to the project, we added Blue Light card holders as well. Teachers have recently been added to that but it’s mostly emergency services, nurses, and lots of frontline workers. Beyond that it also includes veterans and people on benefits. Students was my suggestion, but I think there’s many more groups we could add to that - there’s always ways to widen access projects.
Currently the discounts you get with it are a free consultation with Integro, usually would be £95 but it’s completely free. You can speak to specialists about your conditions, and what medications you would get or need, and how much that would cost – this is before you pay anything at all. You also get cheaper repeat prescription fees. Financial barriers with medical cannabis are huge, and I think that’s a big issue. My idea for the future for GAP is to add as many groups as possible that would benefit and that have increased barriers for getting a prescription.
