Medicinal Cannabis — House of Commons, 2021-09-06
Topic: Health
Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Lady has behaved as the best of constituency MPs would. Indeed, I am sure that all of us, faced with the opportunity to help people in that way, would want to do so I say to my hon. Friend the Minister that, despite the legalisation in November 2018, the system remains broken. It remains broken in respect not only of cannabis but of the psychedelics. A wave of interest came into medicine as a result of cannabis; it came from North America where a significant amount of investor money was going into the new industry because people could see the opportunities that were available there. However, we could not do the research here because it was a schedule 1 drug, and hardly any universities had a schedule 1 licence to do that research. The level of oversight was far greater than that for heroin, as the hon. Member for South Antrim (Paul Girvan) said, so it is no wonder that there has been almost no research on all this down the decades As far as I can see from the 1960s, the psychedelics got shoved into that group as well because pop stars used them. Then, in 2008, we managed to dismiss the chairman of the Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs because he had the presumption to say that riding a horse was a damn sight more dangerous than MDMA. That is what we do to the scientists who produce the evidence: we refuse to listen to the evidence because it will be politically inconvenient and subject to misrepresentation in the media. We owe our constituents way more than that, and it would be remiss of us if we do not examine this whole area on the evidence. I implore my hon. Friend the Minister to listen to it I have spoken about MS, and the hon. Member for South Antrim and others have referred to pain relief. As an alternative to opiate-based medicines, given all the difficulties of the opiate crisis in the United States, cannabis-based medicines offer a serious group of advantages if they can be deployed properly. Meanwhile the psychedelics still sit in schedule 1, making research incredibly difficult and expensive Let us consider depression, addiction and trauma. Of the veterans who have come back from their service in Afghanistan and Iraq in recent years, 7,500 have post-traumatic stress disorder, about a third of whom are beyond treatment within the current treatments available. However, the evidence is that the prescribed and overseen use of psychedelics can get to the relevant part of the brain and enable the psychotherapy to take hold and teach people to acquire the tools with which to manage and deal with their trauma. That can also work for depression and addiction. We are potentially talking about millions of people, if we enable the research to happen. Are we a country that will be on the frontline of bioscience? Are we serious? There is an opportunity for our pharmaceutical industry to get this to scale, and millions of people can be helped A huge cost is currently imposed on our economy by these medical conditions, so surely it makes sense to enable my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, as Minister for medicines, to draw on evidence-based advice. Sitting alongside the MHRA ought to be some kind of cannabis authority, as has been done in Denmark, Holland and Germany, for Ministers to get the advice they need to be able to advance policy confidently, and it needs to be within a wider office for drug control that engages all the relevant Departments. A Department of Health and Social Care lead would be good, but a Cabinet Office lead that brings together everyone who has an interest in this area would be a fine thing, too.