Not a very nice state of affairs
Recently (August 8th), the people at the National Institute for Health Care and Excellence (or NICE as they’re otherwise, and erroneously, known) produced guidelines regarding provision and prescribing of cannabis based medicines.
For those who don’t know about them, NICE are the big guns when it comes to what can and can’t be prescribed. If they say “no”, then it doesn’t happen and that’s the end of the line.
In this instance, they’ve decided that there’s really not enough evidence to support a case for making medical cannabis products available to the public via the NHS. What they were talking about specifically here were medications for children with particularly brutal forms of epilepsy.
A news report that I caught had one of the NICE top dogs relaying the news to the public. Presumably, nobody else wanted to break such a, frankly, disappointing and shitty decision. Either that, or nobody else could be trusted to stick unwaveringly to the “no evidence” script and not blurt out “this is bullshit”.
Because, readers, that’s what it is: plain, disingenuous bullshit.
None of this is about the lack of a robust and convincing evidence base; the country is one huge medical cannabis experiment (and has been for the past 50 years), and there are now enough people out there who have seen with their own eyes how effective cannabis as a medicine actually is in treating their child’s illness and their concurrent distress.
No. It seems to me that all of this “there’s not enough compelling evidence” stuff is distraction and obfuscation. There are two fundamental issues at the heart of this refusal to provide. Neither have anything to do with evidence, and both have been predicted in these pages for several years now.
Okay, let’s cut to the chase here. As far as I can see, the real problems at the root of this are content and cost.
Problem one is that it’s becoming more and more plain that CBD alone just doesn’t cut it. What’s required is full spectrum medicine, and that involves some amount of THC. It might, in some cases, involve a lot of THC. And THC is illegal, even as a medical preparation.
The government have made no secret of the fact that they’ve got no intention of legalising THC, and continue to cling to the “it’s a dangerous gateway drug” mantra. Anyone with a brain knows that this isn’t true, and is little more than leftover dogma from the last century.
Problem two is how much the medication costs. Fact: it costs a lot. Amounts vary, but I’ve read reports of supplies costing up to £2,000 a month. That’s not healthcare; that’s exploitation of desperate people. That’s a rip off.
Regular readers will be aware that various UK government figures are involved in the production chain here, from the growing to the marketing and selling of the final product. These people benefit directly from this rip off.
When health becomes a money-making opportunity (as in the US), then I think we have a serious moral and ethical problem. When the health of extremely ill children becomes a way of pharmaceutical companies getting desperate parents to petition NICE to approve a medicine purely to make money, we’re plumbing completely different depths of exploitative, vulture capitalism.
NICE don’t think the medicine is worth the money that’s being charged for it, and that’s fine: I don’t think it’s worth it either; I just wish everyone would be honest about it. An obvious way out of this situation is to kill the monopoly by making a full range of weed with varying CBD/THC content freely available to everyone who wants or needs it. The only way to achieve this is to legalise it completely. If the UKgovernment truly believes in their “let the market decide” aphorism, let’s see them apply it here.
https://www.nice.org.uk/news/article/nice-draft-guidance-and-nhs-england-review-highlight-need-for-more-research-on-cannabis-based-medicinal-products
