Over the previous couple of weeks, the UK’s medical hashish trade has been written about in The Occasions, The Guardian, the BBC, The i Paper, Non-public Eye, and a swathe of different nationwide and native publications.
The explanations behind this latest media storm are clear, and the core criticism is justified. The tragic demise of Oliver Robinson has uncovered flaws within the nation’s prescribing system that each trade and authorities ought to handle with urgency.
Oliver’s Regulation, the marketing campaign launched by his household to handle these points and the driving pressure behind a lot of this latest protection, requires common sense measures that may be commonplace in every other medical setting.
The difficulty shouldn’t be with the legislation’s calls for or the calls to carry these within the trade who don’t meet medical requirements accountable. Slightly, it’s the illustration of the trade at massive baked into this protection.
Claims made that ‘regulatory oversight of hashish clinics has, up to now, been restricted’, or that trade gamers may be ‘handsomely rewarded’, are deceptive.
Peter Reynolds, president of CLEAR Hashish Regulation Reform, instructed Enterprise of Hashish: “No one, to my data, is making a fortune. To my data, the perfect most individuals are doing is making a residing. It’s so extremely regulated, the calls for are so huge, you’ll be able to’t make a fortune, truly.”
Whereas being candid that ‘some unhealthy actors’ and ‘some irresponsible prescribing’ exist, on the entire, the ‘trade is behaving very effectively, and the protocols which can be in place, offering they’re adopted, are tremendous’.
The trade, by and enormous, shouldn’t be arguing towards reform. It’s arguing towards being misrepresented as negligent, money-hungry, and irresponsible, when the overwhelming majority of clinics go to nice lengths to prioritise affected person security.
What Oliver’s Regulation is definitely asking for
The Oliver’s Regulation marketing campaign, established following the demise of Oliver Robinson, a 34-year-old affected person whose prescription was discovered by a coroner to have contributed to his demise, is asking for a number of key modifications. These embody no hashish prescriptions for sufferers with severe and complicated psychological sickness following a single video session, a central NHS registry recording each prescription issued, and routine CQC inspections with revealed prescribing information.
These measures are frequent sense. Many clinics working to greatest follow already meet or exceed these requirements. The CQC’s personal inspection report reveals that the place failures have occurred, they’ve been concentrated amongst a small variety of suppliers, not distributed throughout the market as an entire.
Graham Woodward, Chief Medical Officer of Releaf Clinic, one of many UK’s largest non-public hashish clinics, says each affected person the place psychiatry is recognized as a priority, even the place the first presenting situation is ache or one other bodily grievance, is rerouted to one of many clinic’s 4 guide psychiatrists or three psychiatric nurses earlier than any prescription is issued.
UK Coverage
Oliver’s Regulation: The Marketing campaign That Might Reshape UK Hashish Prescribing
A rising marketing campaign to tighten safeguards round hashish prescribing within the UK may have far-reaching implications for entry, oversight and medical accountability.
By Ben Stevens
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“Any modifications that come by way of the CQC or round prescribing follow don’t concern me,” Woodward says, “as a result of we’ve by no means deviated from good follow and requirements.”
Woodward’s background is related right here; he’s a registered psychological well being nurse with 28 years of healthcare management expertise throughout statutory, voluntary and personal sectors.
Releaf operates as a chosen physique below NHS revalidation guidelines, has direct entry to NHS Backbone, and holds a number of multidisciplinary crew critiques every day.
Notably, he defined that between 30% and 40% of sufferers who full triage and attain a session nonetheless don’t obtain a prescription. The clinic can be a collaborating member in DICE, Digital Built-in Care Excellence, a month-to-month discussion board that features the MHRA, CQC, ASA and GPhC.
Crucially, none of those options is within the protection that has adopted Oliver Robinson’s demise. Because of this the general public debate is being performed with out info to differentiate remoted regulatory failures from the requirements that a lot of the trade has quietly constructed and maintained
What the information tells us, and what it might probably’t
As we’ve reported extensively, a recurring subject within the UK trade is fractured information assortment.
Enterprise of Hashish‘s personal evaluation of NHSBSA FOI information, revealed in October 2025, discovered a dataset of over 132,000 information factors with no standardised naming conventions, important duplication, and product match charges as little as 77.5% for 2022, which means almost one in 4 prescription information from that 12 months couldn’t be reliably assigned to a selected product.
The NHSBSA itself acknowledged in its FOI response that non-public hashish prescriptions are ‘manually recorded from typically handwritten prescriptions’ with ‘no standardised naming conference for the product names, power, or quantity.’
Woodward defined: “If they don’t perceive what it’s, it goes into an ‘different’ field. I imagine there are 1000’s and 1000’s of prescriptions going into ‘different’ and by no means being counted as hashish prescriptions, as a result of the folks inputting the information manually have no idea what the treatment is.”
The consequence, he argues, is a affected person inhabitants considerably bigger than official figures counsel, he estimates a minimum of 100,000 lively sufferers, towards the 50,000 determine broadly cited.
The identical guide entry course of applies to prescriber codes. If product names are routinely misrecorded, prescriber attribution is topic to the identical danger of error.
The prescriber-level breakdown that powers The Occasions‘ central declare that ten docs issued greater than half of all hashish drugs since 2019 doesn’t seem in any publicly accessible NHSBSA dataset. It was obtained through a bespoke FOI request whose response has not been revealed. Enterprise of Hashish has due to this fact been unable to independently confirm it.
This doesn’t imply the considerations about prescribing focus are unfounded. It means the proof base for the precise declare has not been subjected to the scrutiny it requires.
Enterprise of Hashish can verify that the combination quantity figures cited within the Occasions are broadly according to revealed FOI information: non-public prescriptions for unlicensed cannabis-based medicines reached roughly 283,000 gadgets in 2023 and roughly 659,000 in 2024.
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The expansion is actual, however the conclusions drawn from it are based mostly on an incomplete image. Accepting the constraints of the underlying information, the size of the market warrants context reasonably than alarm.
At roughly 659,000 gadgets in 2024, non-public hashish prescribing stays a small fraction of the medicines prescribed for the situations it predominantly treats.
Greater than 5.6 million folks within the UK have acquired an opioid-based prescription for continual ache, in keeping with NHSBSA information. The British Ache Society estimates 28 million UK adults reside with continual ache.
The 2018 rescheduling of cannabis-based medicines was authorised following a assessment by Professor Dame Sally Davies, then Chief Medical Officer for England, which discovered ‘conclusive or substantial proof that hashish or cannabinoids are efficient for the remedy of continual ache in adults’, proof base that prolonged effectively past paediatric epilepsy, regardless of how the 2018 determination is typically characterised.
Glass Pharms, the UK’s largest home hashish cultivator, has argued that 100,000 gadgets per thirty days implies roughly 30,000 lively sufferers in any given month throughout all situations, a determine it locations towards the estimated 1.77 million folks within the UK utilizing hashish to deal with medical situations and the 5.6 million receiving opioid prescriptions for ache.
James Leavesley, CEO of UK clinic Dalgety, places the regulatory context plainly: “The present stage of prescribing of cannabis-based merchandise for medicinal use within the UK stays modest when considered within the context of broader healthcare demand. Hundreds of thousands of sufferers reside with situations equivalent to continual ache, but entry to CBPMs remains to be tightly ruled by specialist prescribing and clear medical want.
“It is very important recognise that these medicines sit inside the well-established ‘specials’ framework, the place duty for prescribing rests with clinicians appearing in the perfect pursuits of particular person sufferers. This isn’t a volume-driven mannequin, however a clinically led one.
“Because the sector develops, the main target ought to stay on sustaining excessive requirements, making certain merchandise are produced persistently, safely, and in keeping with regulatory expectations. For us, which means constructing a UK-based provide mannequin aligned to affected person want, reasonably than quantity alone.
“The dialog ought to be centred on high quality, governance, and affected person outcomes, reasonably than scale in isolation.”
Sufferers taking legally prescribed medicines already face stigma at work, misunderstandings with legislation enforcement, difficulties at pharmacies, and are reluctant to reveal their remedy to GPs.
Misrepresenting the trade at massive in the end impacts the sufferers it goals to guard. Reform constructed on an correct image of the market will probably be simpler, extra sturdy, and fairer to sufferers. A central registry, one among Oliver’s Regulation’s key calls for, and one which the trade ought to welcome, can be a significant step in the direction of that image.
