“The industry needs these campaigns, but the campaigns need the industry.”
According to new figures from the UK’s Care Quality Commission (CQC), the number of prescriptions for unlicensed medical cannabis in England more than doubled last year.
‘The safer management of controlled drugs: annual update 2023’, published earlier this month, shows that 177,566 cannabis-based products were prescribed between July 01, 2022 and June 30, 2023, up from 81,476 items in the same period a year earlier.
Despite the ongoing growth of the UK’s private medical health sector, growth rates are still being hamstrung by a lack of awareness, with some figures suggesting there are around 1.8m medical cannabis patients in the UK, but only a fraction of these have a legal prescription.
More importantly, however, this lack of awareness is continuing to impact patients. A recent study found that one in five police officers is still unaware that medical cannabis is legal in the UK five years after legalisation, while the majority of police officers say their training on the topic is inadequate.
Although a number of individual campaigns are currently running in tandem in an attempt to raise awareness among patients, authorities and medical professionals, the ‘fractured’ nature of the industry means these struggle to cut through, often getting stuck in an echo chamber and failing to reach their intended audience.
4C Labs Chief Revenue Officer, and Co-Chair of the Prescription Cannabis Subcommittee of the Cannabis Industry Council (CIC), James Smith, believes that such campaigns are essential for the industry to progress, and that greater support from the country’s leading businesses is crucial in shifting the dial.
“If we fail as an industry to support the efforts via these campaigns… we’re going to be having this same conversation in a year’s time.”
A rising tide lifts all boats
One such campaign is the CIC’s ‘Prescription Cannabis Public Awareness Campaign’, which launched in April this year.
To date, the crowdfunding campaign has received just £2,070 from five supporters, £1,000 of which came from Mr Smith. It has also received verbal commitments of a further £6000, but £12,000 is still needed for it to reach its target.
“Effectively, the industry needs these campaigns, but these campaigns need the industry too.”
One of the key issues that continues to keep potential patients from pursuing a medical cannabis prescription is the general lack of understanding of the wide range of conditions medical cannabis can treat alongside the vast array of formats, from whole flower, to vapes and oils, that it is available in.
Those who are aware it is legal often assume it is only prescribed for rare conditions like intractible epilepsy, but remain unaware that it can be prescribed for common conditions such as pain, sleep and anxiety. Driving awareness around these points is a key goal of this campaign.
“How do we effectively double the number of patients in the space? It’s through awareness, and it’s through the promotion of the idea, in my mind, that becoming a legal patient offers you a level of protection.”
“Stories of patients losing their homes or being thrown off flights because of their legal medical cannabis script are very bad for business. Until patients can clearly see that a prescription and that industry are supporting them, why would they become patients? We need to do a better job of protecting the patients that are paying our salaries.”
Guy Coxall, Founder of Seed Our Future, has also voiced his frustrations at the industry’s lack of support for his work.
For a number of years, Mr Coxall has been conducting crucial work offering legal support to medical cannabis patients who have been unjustly penalised by authorities for consuming their prescriptions, entirely free of charge.
You can donate to the CIC’s ‘Prescription Cannabis Public Awareness Campaign’ here.
You can donate to Seed Our Future’s fundraising campaign here.
“I work pretty much seven days a week for free, supporting patients with all these things. It’s very tiring and time-consuming, as you can imagine,” he told Business of Cannabis.
As patient numbers have increased, we’re now looking at around 45,000, I can’t keep up. I have about 20 new cases this week.
Mr Coxall went on to explain that clinics and consultants across the UK regularly refer patients to Seed Our Future when they are dealing with legal disputes.
In an effort to alleviate his workload, which he says is ‘destroying (his) health and life’, Mr Coxall launched a similar fundraising campaign, hoping to raise enough to train a ‘couple of full-time lawyers’ on dealing with medical cannabis cases.
“Because they would be paid a full-time wage, they would be able to continue supporting patients for free, almost like an insurance policy,” he explained.
Asking patients to donate just £30, Mr Coxall said he had been ‘anticipating that quite a few patients who see me on a daily basis in the patient groups, helping patients get off driving offences and that sort of thing, would contribute and help me out’.
“Unfortunately, it’s not gone that way. I’ve currently got less than 0.65% of patients, around 100, who have contributed around £4,000.”
Notably, Mr Coxall says that he reached out to all of the clinics across the UK, which he estimates to be around 40, to ask for support in promoting his campaign.
“I didn’t ask for any money. All I wanted them to do was email out the campaign so that I could actually get it to reach the patients. Only one clinic has actually posted anything out.”
With no support forthcoming from the clinics that often refer their patients to him, Mr Coxall says he is ‘on the cusp of quitting’, which would cause ‘serious harm’ to the patient community, which has come to rely on his support.
“I blame mainly the industry for it failing, and now they’re going to have to find some way to sort out patients, or they’re going to lose lots of patients. They’re just not interested in supporting patients, which I’m surprised about. They may have no legal obligation, but they have a moral one.”
With hundreds of millions of pounds being invested into UK cannabis businesses over the past five years from both institutional and retail investors alike, calls to divert some of this money into campaigns which will benefit the entire sector are nothing new, but are now more important than ever.
