Medical Cannabis under Prescription — House of Commons, 2019-05-20
Topic: Health
James Roger Cartlidge (Conservative, Centre-right): It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady), who made a very good speech. It is always a pleasure to see someone fighting hard for their constituents, as we all are. He is right that all Members are mentioning similar cases, and I will also be doing so, but I first want to pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Sir Mike Penning) and the hon. Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for the great passion and tenacity with which they have campaigned on the behalf of those who are suffering such pain. Sufferers are looking for a way to reduce their pain, and they believe that they have found one. That is the key challenge for us My case concerns a four-year-old girl called Indie-Rose. Her parents Anthony Clarry and Tannine Montgomery live in Clare in my constituency. Indie-Rose has Dravet syndrome and, as we have heard in other cases, suffers from frequent terrible seizures as a result of her epilepsy. Her parents have found that cannabis-based medicine reduces those seizures dramatically—they estimate by around 75%—but it comes at a huge cost, because my constituents have had to crowdsource thousands of pounds to go over to Holland, pay for the medicine and bring it back. I strongly feel that we must examine this issue because, as others have said, that situation cannot be sustainable, especially in a country that has a free healthcare system that is designed to help not just those in need but the most vulnerable in particular The compound that Indie-Rose’s parents have been purchasing is artisanal and unlicensed. It is a mixture of Bedrolite and Bedica, which of course contain THC, and the single greatest issue for me is that while there is evidence about the impact of CBD, there is little evidence about THC. When I first became involved in the case, I felt that I had a duty to understand it more and to appreciate why there was resistance in what we might loosely call the medical establishment to prescribing a THC-based solution, such as that which was already being given to Indie-Rose and which was successfully, in her parents’ opinion, reducing her pain and suffering. I organised a meeting to discuss the situation in April at Addenbrooke’s hospital with some of the most senior clinicians that one could hope to have in a room, all of whom were familiar with Indie-Rose’s case. We are lucky to have hon. Members in this House with serious medical experience, but most of us are not clinicians, and none of us is the clinician in the cases that we are talking about. We are politicians, so I wanted to understand better the barriers to the NHS prescription that my constituents were seeking At times in this debate, the situation has been spoken of as if the argument is about whether cannabis-based medicine should be prescribed at all, but it is clearly about the type of medicines that should be prescribed. There is clearly nervousness in the medical establishment about THC. We should not hide from that point, and there is perhaps a very good reason for that point of view.