Why doctors have a moral imperative to prescribe and support medical cannabis—an essay by David Nutt

The field of medicine developed empirically with doctors doing what they could to help reduce the suffering and improve the health of their patients. Medicines were what doctors gave patients to assist this process. Medical cannabis presents a novel challenge to current medical practice—many patients reporting large benefits from self-medicating with illicitly sourced products would dearly like to have them prescribed on the NHS but are unable to do so.

Cannabis has been classed as a medicine in the United Kingdom since November 2018 (box 1). The decision to make it available as a medicine was precipitated by the case of Billy Caldwell, a boy with severe epilepsy who nearly died after returning from Canada when his medical cannabis was confiscated by custom’s officers. Sally Davies, then the chief medical officer, recommended the government move plant based cannabis extracts from schedule 1 to schedule 2 of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, at the request of the home secretary.2