Britain’s patient outlaws

Medical cannabis is legal in places as diverse as Canada, Uruguay, Israel and Jamaica. But could legalisation work in the UK? Katharine Quarmby finds out.

n a cold spring evening I catch a fast train from London to Maidstone in Kent, to meet Clark French, a young man with multiple sclerosis. I’m joining him and his companions from the United Patients Alliance (UPA) on a road tour of the UK. The group French founded last year has one, on the face of it, simple mission: the legalisation of medical cannabis in the UK.

I arrive a little early at the old Victorian building where the UPA is holding its meeting. French arrives five minutes later, smiling and leaning on a stick, and we go inside. While Alex, another activist, fires up the tea urn, French explains that he has also been firing up, discreetly, nearby. He tells me that the pain, tremors and spasms he experiences from his multiple sclerosis can be controlled with cannabis. Without it, he says, his ability to get out of bed in the mornings, let alone do things like speak at meetings, would be greatly reduced.

Although many UPA members live with painful conditions such as arthritis, multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease, they are campaigning hard on this single issue, eschewing the wider issue of wholesale legalisation. In his speech to the meeting, French stresses that language could help shift public perception – that “patients” should talk about “medicating” and refer to cannabis as a “medicine” rather than as a recreational “drug”. “Multiple sclerosis took so much from me,” says French. “But if prohibition wasn’t there, I could have my life back… we all deserve it. That’s my motivation.”

Reference:

Hansard for the proceedings of the Misuse of Drugs Bill through Parliament: the most interesting debates are listed below, all worth a read as the Act is still law today.

– Commons 2nd Reading, 25 March 1970 (including an amendment to include tobacco)

– Commons 2nd Reading, 16 July 1970 (re-introduced after the general election and change of government)

– Lords 2nd Reading, 14 January 1971

– Lords amendment, 4 February 1971 (an amendment to make cannabis Class D).

Suzanne Taylor’s excellent PhD thesis on how cannabis has been seen in the UK.
The report from an excellent seminar on the medicalisation of cannabis held by the Wellcome Trust and UCL.
A useful timeline on international drug policy.
A recent meta-review of scientific studies of the efficacy of medical cannabis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

To understand more about the history of re-introducing cannabis as a medicine in the USA, a good place to start is the blog of Alice O ’Leary-Randall, the so-called ‘first lady of medical marijuana’.
More Than a Puff of Smoke is an interesting (but not very well written) book by Dr Ian Dunbar, one of the doctors who prescribed cannabis in the UK and became notorious for doing so.
To understand the case against both medical cannabis and wider legalisation, look at this site from Smart Approaches to Marijuana, a US body of professionals dedicated to what they call a “middle road between incarceration and legalization“.
The United Patients Alliance is a British group launched last year with the sole aim of legalising cannabis for medical use in the UK.

Category:	Health & Fitness

Attribution

The source of this flipbook:
Katharine Quarmby. (2015, August 17). Britain’s patient outlaws. Mosaic Science. https://mosaicscience.com/story/cannabis/
This article first appeared on Mosaic and is republished here under a Creative Commons licence.

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