My Lords, I will need to speak only very briefly because the noble Lord, Lord Field of Birkenhead, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Meacher and Lady Walmsley, have covered the ground extensively, fully and informatively. It is a privilege to be involved in an amendment moved by my noble friend Lord Field of Birkenhead. We have been friends, discussing such issues for very many years, although he was in a different House, so it is a pleasure to see him and support his amendment.
My noble friend Lord Field spoke from personal experience, and my noble friend Lady Meacher spoke extensively about the information available. In 1998, the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Lords recommended that there should be a programme to assess the medicinal use of cannabis and that ways should be found to use it. NICE has recommended one or two areas where it can be used, as has already been said. Very few NHS prescriptions have been given out, but more than 1 million people use cannabis preparations bought privately at huge cost. They use them because they find benefit from them. The report suggests that the people who benefit from it mostly suffer from chronic pain. Despite that, reports have been published where people with Alzheimer’s, cancer, chronic pain, Crohn’s disease and multiple sclerosis, to name but a few, found benefits from it. More than 20,000 publications on PubMed, not of clinical trials, but of people’s experience and data collected from patients, show that they have found it to be beneficial.
When recommending and assessing medicinal products using cannabis, NICE suggested that research should be carried out in six or seven areas. I do not know what research has been carried out. The problem with such a recommendation is that it does not recommend who should do the research. So I ask the question: who should be doing this research to explore the benefits that patients find in medicinal cannabis?
Private clinics prescribe more and more cannabis on a daily basis, and more and more clinics are opening in cities in England where cannabis is available. My noble friend Lady Meacher and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, alluded to two important issues. One is that a way needs to be found to collect information on patients’ experiences and data to show why so many patients go to private clinics to get cannabis products and what benefits they derive from them.
I look forward to the Minister’s response, but I hope she may agree, as it would not require legislation or an amendment to the Bill, that the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care through the NIHR should establish a forum of specialists, including patients, to find a way forward to collect information on a more formal basis. I hope the Minister will respond positively to that. It has been a pleasure to take part in this debate.