My Lords, I shall speak briefly to this amendment because the noble Baroness has said most of what I was going to say. The aim, of course, is to decriminalise the 30,000 patients in this country who currently take cannabis not because they want some sort of high—they do not—but because cannabis, they say, is the best drug for their particular pain, seizures or discomfort. It seems to me that that is important.
The types of illnesses that can be helped have already been stated: multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Crohn’s disease, epilepsy, chronic pain, glaucoma, and nausea and loss of appetite caused by chemotherapy. That is a lot of illnesses—disturbing and distressing illnesses—the symptoms of which can be alleviated by cannabis, so it does seem strange that there is such a resistance to reschedule cannabis from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2. Any substance from Schedule 1 has no recognised medicinal use. I just do not understand this, but maybe the Minister can comment on how any Government—it is not this Government; it is every Government—can continue to maintain that cannabis has no recognised medicinal use when Germany and Italy make sure that people with these illnesses can gain access to it. Germany and Italy and many countries across the world know that this is important for their populations. It would be really helpful if the Minister would consider that point.
I also want to draw the attention of the Minister and your Lordships to the extraordinary case of a little seven year-old boy called Jayden. Jayden suffers with Dravet syndrome—an extremely severe form of epilepsy—where he has at least 500 fits a day. He was on 22 pills a day including benzodiazepines. These medications plus the seizures resulting from the illness were giving him hallucinations and terrors. The poor child would scream for literally eight hours at a stretch until he was exhausted and presumably would fall asleep. His mother left home because she could not take it, so he was being looked after by his father.
When the child was four and a half, the father was told that he probably would not live another week. The father asked whether he should try medicinal
cannabis. The doctor said that he should try anything, and so he did. The day after the child was given cannabis that the father had found in a chemist’s—this was in the United States; it could not happen here—the child suffered no fits, and then no fits on the following day. Since then he has had a small number, but nothing like before. He is now being painfully weaned off all the drugs that he had been taking, including the benzodiazepines. Anyone who knows anything about those drugs—I do not, actually—will say that it is excruciating to come off them. The poor boy has been put through all this, but he does now smile, walk and play in the water. But, of course, after all those seizures, I imagine that his brain is very damaged.
I have a five-minute clip, and I would ask the Minister to take five minutes of his precious time to look at it. I know that that is a lot of time in a Minister’s day, but even if one child is spared from going through the hell of that illness, I would suggest that that is well worth five minutes. This is a slightly cheeky request to make of a Minister, but it may be an important piece of work that the Minister could do.
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