UK's First Medical Marijuana Clinical Trial Gets Underway: National Health Service Remains Cautious

It has been five years since medical marijuana use was legalized in the United Kingdom and the life-saving medicine is still not widely available through the National Health Service (NHS) nor has the government undertaken or funded clinical trials.

While new reports reveal that imports of medical cannabis have tripled this year, indicating a growing need for this plant, the vast majority of patients still have to pay out of their pockets to buy it. The NHS is not prepared to reimburse medical marijuana without more clinical evidence about its therapeutic benefits and safety.

The London-listed company, Celadon Pharmaceuticals, the first UK-based medical cannabis manufacturer to be granted a Home Office license to sell its products, recently began the first clinical trial of this kind in the UK, reports Sky News.

As part of the trial, 5000 patients with chronic pain are given ground marijuana buds in a special inhaler that dispenses the prescribed dose. The trial was approved by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the NHS Research Ethics Committee. The approval came after a preliminary study on 500 patients showed that marijuana reduced the need for opioid painkillers and improved sleep.

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Better Quality Of Life

Celadon is also the first company in the UK to be granted a Good Manufacturing Practice or GMP registration by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to produce medical marijuana on UK soil. It cultivates marijuana plants in environments where growing conditions such as light, humidity, temperature and nutrients can be controlled to produce flower buds with predictable amounts of active compounds. The plants contain THC in amounts small enough not to cause a psychoactive reaction.

"We are a pharma company, not a cannabis company," James Short, Celadon’s co-founder said. "We've got to try and get away from the stigma. When I first got involved in the business I was nervous to even talk about it with friends. But our job is not to get people high. It's to give them a better quality of life."

While this clinical trial is a major step for the medical marijuana program, it remains uncertain what it will take for NHS and doctors to be convinced that medical marijuana is a safe alternative to opioids. Dr. Alan Fayaz, an NHS consultant and a spokesperson for the British Pain Society said that even though there is significant real-world evidence from patients that cannabis helps alleviate pain, doctors are right to be careful.

"In the aftermath of what happened with opioids the medical community is understandably a little bit skeptical about introducing a new drug without really robust evidence," Fayaz said. “The opioid epidemic has perhaps done cannabis a bit of a disservice because it's tainted ground."

Continue reading on Sky News.

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Photo: Benzinga edit with images by Chokniti Khongchum via Pexels, Pete Linforth and nneem from Pixabay