OPINION: As a UK cannabis patient, this is the reality of prohibition

A UK medical cannabis patient, who asked not to be named in this piece, writes about the personal impact of prohibition, for Cannabis Health. 

As we enter times of financial hardship, I am starting to come to the realisation that I will no longer be able to afford my cannabis prescription. 

At £450 for both the cannabis oils and cannabis flower a month, I won’t be able to pay it and I will be left to fend for myself in a bid to combat my chronic pain illness.

I have decided to voice my opinion on the matter, to try and explain what is happening to people like me in the UK and how cannabis prohibition affects my right to have access to a medicine.

The government’s main tool in the prohibition of the medicinal herb cannabis is the silence in which it operates. If I were to ask strangers on the street how much they thought medicinal cannabis costs in the UK, I would be willing to bet that 70-90% of them would turn around and tell me it is illegal – or that they don’t know. 

Let down by the NHS

We have thousands of people in the UK suffering with debilitating, life-altering illnesses, who are unable to work and yet are being charged £450 a month for cannabis medication supplied by clinics that are licensed by the same government which spends hundreds of millions of pounds a year combating the illegal substance, cannabis. 

Many of these people, like myself, have tried different medications through the NHS but find that cannabis is the safer or most effective medication to use with manageable side effects.

I find it strange and obtuse that if these people were to get fed up giving their money away to multi-million pound pharmaceutical companies and decided to grow the medication themselves, they would be raided by the police and processed as a criminal. 

I think most people would be shocked to find out that people in our country are forced to pay so much money for a medication they could grow themselves at home for a quarter of the cost. 

This is a problem that could potentially affect us all one day. All it takes is a car crash or an unlucky fall and you could become a sufferer of chronic pain. If you’re lucky you will have a very direct diagnosis, but if you’re unlucky you could spend years being tested on different medications, surgeries and therapies before eventually getting diagnosed and settled into long-term treatment. 

You may even be told that the pain you experience every second of every waking moment is a lie and that it is all in your head. Easily the most dangerous part of your diagnoses will be the experimentation of medications with an estimated 200 million reported adverse reactions to medications within the NHS per year. 

The NHS’s own literature doesn’t believe that the opioids that they will undoubtedly prescribe you for your chronic pain condition, like they did me, are the best medication for the job.

“Opioids are good analgesics for acute pain and pain at the end of life,” the guidance states.
“But there is little evidence that they are helpful for long-term pain.”

The cost of medical cannabis

The NHS can prescribe you the wrong medicine for decades at little to no cost, while the right medicine is sold at a markup of 4,700% privately?

That figure is not an exaggeration. The cost of an NHS prescription is £9.50 which you only need to pay once or twice a month on average for pain medication. The cost of my private cannabis prescription is about £450 a month, that would be the equivalent of 47.3 NHS prescriptions per month.

If I was allowed to grow cannabis and supply myself with medicine, it would cost me £40-£60 per month depending on the time of the year that I am growing it. 

I really struggle to understand why I’m being forced to pay the extra £390 a month. The fault is with the government, as they could give me the right to medicate. I find it interesting that the same medical governing bodies that have allowed opioids to be misused by the NHS are the same ones the government looks to when it debates legalising cannabis in the house of commons. 

Doesn’t this all seem a bit shifty to you? Why are they still debating legalising a plant that they are currently selling in part to the public as a medicine? 

Surely, if a patient can grow their own medication at home for a fraction of the cost they should be allowed to legally do so. The only reason I could think of for which I would not allow this, is if I was currently picking their pockets selling it to them, instead of allowing them to have it. 

This is the silence I am talking about. This to me is a scandal of epic proportions which should be on the front page of the national papers daily until the government sorts it out.

Sadly, the national news won’t do that, as it doesn’t align with its own interests. A story about the government backed thievery carried out on our most vulnerable members of the public is not going to beat a Love Island story to the front page.

The public just doesn’t seem to care about this issue enough for it to be relevant, which is a perfect smokescreen for a corrupt government

Home office statistics 

It gets worse still, when we investigate the statistics from the Home Office’s own data. This graph shows that 59% of cannabis plant seizures were for quantities of 10 plants or less.

Source: Home Office. Seizures of drugs, in England and Wales, financial year ending 2020

People who are growing 10 plants are not criminals, they are likely to be people like myself trying to grow and consume a medicine. 

It also shows that 45% of the cannabis plant seizures were for five or less plants. This means that roughly half of the £300million the Home Office spends of our tax money per year enforcing prohibition is spent targeting people who, like myself, are just trying to grow a few plants. It gets worse when we see 2020s statistics for cannabis bud and resin seizures.

Source: Home Office. Seizures of drugs, in England and Wales, financial year ending 2020

An average of 17% of the seizures were for amounts of cannabis plant matter under 1g. This is the same weight as 15.432 grains of sugar, an actual deadly substance. 

In total 72% of the seizures were for 5g or less of cannabis herbal flower.  The police will promote themselves as taking down big dangerous grows and taking out major suppliers, but the truth is that they are mainly pestering end users wasting tax money and police time.

They are policing people like me, who choose not to pay government-backed pharmaceutical companies £450 a month for medication that I can grow for £60 a month. They would throw me in jail for this plant and post me all over social media as the local criminal, just because I chose to grow medicinal herbs in my home, harming nobody. 

My wife would have to raise the children alone while I sit in prison being another waste on our tax fund. 

Why does nobody care about this? It is our own people they are targeting, as only 2% of the cannabis bud seizures were for large amounts of cannabis. It’s bad enough that we are dealing with inflation without letting our government waste so much money enforcing a drug that is prescribed as medicine.

We need to be allowed to grow 10 plants and hold up to a couple of ounces at the very least.

In doing this we could cut the amount of money spent enforcing cannabis by roughly 60% while full decriminalisation would save us the costs of upholding prohibition.

This would be a godsend for me as I would no longer have to spend £5,640 a year paying a legality tax on cannabis medication, and I would be free to grow my medicine at home. 

Putting profit over patients?

There are currently 20,000 patients receiving cannabis legally in the UK and that number is expected to exponentially grow. They are paying pharmaceutical companies millions of pounds a year between them for their treatment. 

Is the truth that the plant is illegal so that the government can secure its market for themselves and their pharmaceutical friends to profit from? Are members of the public, who possess cannabis illegally, in fact competitors to the market with the police acting as liquidators to protect government interests? Is this what you are paying the police to do with cannabis enforcement, and why I am forced to pay so much for a medication that grows as easily as a tomato plant?

If we allow this to happen with this medication, what is to stop them from doing this again with another? Or privatising the whole NHS itself leaving us to the mercy of the insurance companies?

We take our NHS for granted and have forgotten the world as it was before free healthcare, when a simple illnesses would kill you because you couldn’t afford the hospital treatment. 

I’m doing okay right now and can afford my medication, but it won’t be long before I can’t make those £450 payments and I will be back to square one with my health condition.

It won’t be the crippling agonising pain that will hurt the most, it will be the knowledge that the medicine is out there to take the pain away, I just can’t afford it.

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