The story · written by gpt-6.1-sol-medium,
Britain’s path to medical cannabis did not begin with doctors or politicians. It began with a woman who had multiple sclerosis and could not buy the one thing that helped.
The gap
Cannabis-based medicines were withdrawn in the United Kingdom in 1973. A synthetic cannabinoid, nabilone, was licensed in 1982 for the side effects of cancer treatment. The licence did not permit patients to possess herbal cannabis. Taylor also describes exceptional named-patient prescribing of nabilone for other symptoms.
Clare Hodges
Hodges had lived with MS for nine years. Orthodox medicine had given her limited relief and many side effects. After reading about cannabis in a medical journal she tried smoking it.
Getting it was the first difficulty. “As a middle-class mother of two young children,” she recalled, “I had a bit of a problem obtaining cannabis.” When she did, “the physical relief was almost immediate … I was comfortable with my body for the first time in years.”
She tried nabilone when it became available, hoping for a legal alternative. It gave her side effects without the benefit, and she went back to the plant.
The Alliance
In 1992 her neurologist put her in touch with other patients doing the same. They formed the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics, named after an American group, to campaign for research and for access through the health service.
They were clear about what they were not.
We are not campaigning for the general legalization of cannabis.
Seriously ill people, Hodges said, should get their medicine from a doctor and not have to supply it themselves. That separation from the legalisation campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s, which had failed, was the Alliance’s strength. So was her respectability.
What it achieved
The Alliance and the MS Society gave evidence to a House of Lords committee in the 1998 inquiry, putting patients’ experience before parliament. The two groups differed: the Alliance wanted access to herbal cannabis while trials ran, and the Society would not press for it. The 1994 delegation and 1997 conference helped connect advocacy with research. Later CAMS results showed why patient experience and clinical outcome measures remained contested.
The plant itself stayed illegal for patients until 2018, after the cases of two children with severe epilepsy. By then the MS Society had changed its mind about herbal cannabis too.
The index lists the Alliance for context; it moved no score for the United Kingdom.[1]
Listed for context. No score change is recorded for United Kingdom here.
References
- Forces of Necessity: Lay Advocacy and the Remedicalization of Cannabis in the UK, 1973–2004Suzanne Taylor · In Cannabis: Global Histories, edited by Lucas Richert, James H. Mills · MIT Press · 2021 · pp. 341–357 · ISBN 9780262366137
- Forces of Necessity: Lay Advocacy and the Remedicalization of Cannabis in the UK, 1973–2004Suzanne Taylor · In Cannabis: Global Histories, edited by Lucas Richert, James H. Mills · MIT Press · 2021 · pp. 346 · ISBN 9780262366137
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read.