When the United Kingdom announced the historic step of rescheduling cannabis and allowing physicians to prescribe it two months ago, patients and advocates were concerned about whether actual herbaceous flower would be allowed or only extracts. Now the first patient, a Brighton woman suffering from fibromyalgia, is approved to receive cannabis under the program, and it is indeed going to be dried flower.<\/p>\n
The bad news: With the National Health Service barred by bureaucratic hurdles from providing it, patients are at the mercy of the market and the price is prohibitive.<\/p>\n
Carly Barton, 32, has been dealing with\u00a0chronic pain<\/a>\u00a0associated with fibromyalgia since surviving a stroke some 10 years ago.\u00a0The former university lecturer was first prescribed powerful\u00a0opioid drugs<\/a>, including morphine and fentanyl \u2014 but said they just left her feeling \u201czombied\u201d while failing to even alleviate the pain. She began illegally self-medicating with cannabis two years ago, to much better results.\u00a0And last month, she was legally prescribed cannabis by a Manchester-based private pain specialist, Dr. David McDowell.<\/p>\n Answering a question on the minds of many patients and advocates since the Home Office\u00a0announced the rescheduling of cannabis<\/a>\u00a0in October, actual \u201cflower-based products\u201d are to be supplied to Barton, imported from the Netherlands. The Dutch firm\u00a0Bedrocan<\/a>\u00a0is named as the producer.<\/p>\n But if that is encouraging news, the price is decidedly not. A three-month course will cost Barton around \u00a32,500 \u2014 the equivalent of over $3,000. At her prescribed 1 gram per day, that comes to about four ounces for well more than what a pound goes for on the black market.<\/p>\n Barton said the prescription \u201cmade history\u201d as it is the first since Britain banned cannabis in 1928. But she has been protesting to the press that she will have to blow all of her savings on just one course before being forced to return to the black market.<\/p>\n Even though cannabis is now Schedule II in the UK pursuant to the October decision, the publicly funded\u00a0National Health Service<\/a>\u00a0is still restrained from supplying it in most cases under stringent interim guidelines. Barton called this state of affairs \u201cprohibition under a different name.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe guidelines they have produced aren\u2019t working. In the month that they have been produced, no doctor has felt guided to write a prescription,\u201d Barton told the\u00a0Mirror<\/a>. \u201cThose guidelines need setting on fire as far as I\u2019m concerned, and the NHS specialists need to be made to feel comfortable about making a clinical decision.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an unfair system where the rich will have access and the poor will still have their doors kicked in by police,\u201d she added to the\u00a0Daily Mail<\/a>.<\/p>\n She also painted a grim picture to the\u00a0Daily Star<\/a>: \u201cAt the moment, patients are being turned away, there\u2019s posters up in waiting rooms saying don\u2019t even ask about it, people aren\u2019t getting an appointment if they\u2019re saying that\u2019s why they\u2019re coming over the phone.\u201d And she recalled her experiences purchasing illegally. \u201cI\u2019ve been on walking sticks [crutches] in dark parks, meeting strangers on my own in the winter in agony,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n The NHS\u00a0interim guidelines<\/a>\u00a0state that cannabis should only be provided to patients where there is clear published evidence of its efficacy or where other medicines have been exhausted. As Britain\u2019s\u00a0iNews<\/a>\u00a0interprets the regs: \u201cVery few people in England are likely to be prescribed medical cannabis [through the NHS]. Currently, it is only likely to be children and adults with rare, severe forms of epilepsy or adults with vomiting or nausea caused by chemotherapy. Even with these, it would only be considered when other treatments weren\u2019t suitable or hadn\u2019t helped.\u201d<\/p>\n A final perversity, as Barton pointed out to\u00a0Sky News<\/a>, is that the high price of her cannabis is due to the cost of importing it;\u00a0the same Bedrocan bud goes for only about six euros a gram in the Netherlands (just slightly over six dollars). And in addition to the outrageous price, there is also to be a burdensome delay. Because the Home Office must authorize the importation, it could be weeks before Barton actually receives her cannabis.<\/p>\n And this is rendered doubly perverse by the fact that the UK itself is the\u00a0world\u2019s biggest producer of legal cannabis<\/a>, thanks to the industrial-scale grow operations of\u00a0GW Pharmaceuticals<\/a>\u00a0for the production of medications such as\u00a0Epidiolex<\/a>.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, unless the NHS guidelines change, and quickly, medical marijuana in the UK could be an empty promise. As iNews quotes Barton: \u201cThis prescription will absolutely clear me out \u2014 my savings, everything will be gone and in two months\u2019 time I won\u2019t be able to afford to repeat this prescription, so I\u2019m going to be a criminal again by buying it illegally.\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US<\/b>, would you turn back to the black market if your legal medical marijuana got too expensive?<\/p>\n The post The UK\u2019s Medical Marijuana Program Could Be the Most Expensive in the World<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
When the United Kingdom announced the historic step of rescheduling cannabis and allowing physicians to prescribe it two months ago, patients and advocates were concerned about whether actual herbaceous flower would be allowed or only extracts. Now the first patient, a Brighton woman suffering from fibromyalgia, is approved to receiveContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":190,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1143,50,6862,3156,3157,6863,53,415,139,4873,6864,1572],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31624"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/190"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31624"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31624\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31625,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31624\/revisions\/31625"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Bureaucratic Paradoxes<\/h4>\n
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\nRead More: The UK\u2019s Medical Marijuana Program Could Be the Most Expensive in the World<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"