Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what progress he has made on ensuring that medical cannabis is available to people who need it.

The law was changed on 1 November 2018 to allow clinicians on the General Medical Council’s ‘Specialist Register’ to prescribe cannabis-based products for medicinal use, where clinically appropriate and in the best interest of patients.

Interim clinical guidance has been issued by the Royal College of Physicians, the British Paediatric Neurology Association and the Association of British Neurologists to support doctors looking to prescribe cannabis-based products. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has been commissioned to develop updated clinical guidance on the prescribing of cannabis-based medicinal products, which will be published by October 2019. It will be based on the best available international evidence and will have been produced using NICE’s world-renowned process for delivering such guidance.