100 MPs urge Government to fund medical cannabis prescriptions

In a joint letter, 100 cross-party politicians have called on the Prime Minister to provide urgent funding for families’ private prescriptions.

Since medical cannabis was legalised in 2018, it is thought that only three children in the UK have been granted NHS prescriptions.

Dozens of families of children with severe, treatment-resistant epilepsy are still forced to pay up to £2,000 a month for their children’s life saving medication. 

The letter, which has been signed by 100 MPs and Peers, calls for the Government to grant “compassionate funding” to help these families, until there is wider access on the NHS.

Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Access to Medical Cannabis Under Prescription who authored the letter, said families were “emotionally and financially broken”.

The coronavirus crisis has restricted fundraising efforts leaving families carrying a “severe financial burden” and at risk of running out of medication “within weeks”.

Antoniazzi appealed to Boris Johnson to “grant access to some form of compassionate funding until the wider issues can be resolved”, the BBC reported on Friday 16 April.

A 2019 review carried out by the Department of Health into the blocks in issuing NHS prescriptions, called for an observational trial in which these children would have access to medical cannabis at no cost. 

But writing in The Times last week Antoniazzi said the APPG was informed that plans for the trial had been “effectively dropped”. 

The campaign group End Our Pain has called for the funding as a “short-term solution” to relieve some of the burden on these families.