Over the past 3-4 months, I’ve been extremely ill and using medical CannaCaps and edibles to help ease my growing health concerns.
Since the summer of this year, so much has changed, especially in regards to the landscape of medical cannabis use. It’s all getting very complicated and a little crazy, so my close circle of friends and family and I have been tirelessly researching, attempting to understand the current Medical Marijuana agenda.
You may, like me, be asking what the score is with medical cannabis use, especially after the past few months with one small change after another, the laws and legislation is a political and moral minefield.
‘Do the new and slight changes to the legislation give me moral leverage?’
So, on the 1st of November last year, following a controversial medical Marijuana spring and summer, the government passed legislation that would allow specialists, doctors like neurologists, to prescribe cannabis to all and any serious medical conditions, if they felt the product would be beneficial to their patients. All be it the product has to be of medical grade – which isn’t a bad thing. This followed on from the highly criticised ‘expert panel’ – a group of scientists and health ministers that were brought in to oversee the prescribing of cannabis to a small number of ailments, including epilepsy. However, this was deemed ineffective, and the panel has now been disbanded. The responsibility now lies solely with the specialist doctors that are entitled to prescribe medical cannabis products.
Am I entitled to get marijuana on prescription, or is this another small placebo move, leaving the cannabis treatments in a state of limbo.
Although it is now legal for many registered medical specialists to prescribe, the official guidelines that govern the prescription of Cannabis or Cannabis based products like Sativex, they regularly advise against the prescribing of medical cannabis. Even pharmaceutical drugs like Sativex are only recommended in Wales. If you fall into the small bracket that would allow you to gain access to this crucial drug, you would still have the NHS to convince in regard to funding. With many licenced Cannabis based products being deemed too expensive, it leaves specialist doctors second-guessing themselves, often shying away from the prescribing of this medicinal breakthrough, simply to avoid the earache they may receive from the upper echelons of the NHS.
So where does that leave me? Well, I’m guessing that now the small acceptance of medical cannabis allows medical users, as well as others, some moralistic leverage.
‘If it’s legal on one hand, then surely I’m not breaking a bad law by obtaining it myself on the other’.
With the acceptance of cannabis in the medical field, this should now, hopefully, allow us to medicate without the worry of prosecution. If the government have sanctioned the use of Cannabis in one hand, even with its restrictions, surely all use of the medicinal weed should be less frowned upon by the authorities?
The current guidelines allow for epilepsy, and MS, as well as other major illnesses that have been highly publicised this year. However, it is not recommended for pain control or Cystic Fibrosis. If it can be safely used to combat certain ailments, surely no patient should be exiled from at least one medical trial. Surely this small progression of acceptance should be rolled out across the board, especially to those suffering long-term illness? If not, the morality of black-market use should be debated, and authorities may need to relax their clamp on unauthorised medical use. Surely, people can see that they can’t give with one hand and take with the other.
Let us know what you think…
