Pubdate: 8 Nov 1998
Source: The Observer (UK)
Contact:  Andy McSmith, Chief Political Correspondent; (and Nick Paton Walsh)

LORDS CALL FOR CANNABIS TO BE LEGALISED AS PAINKILLER 

The campaign to legalise cannabis will get its most powerful boost this
week when a House of Lords committee calls for the drug to be available for
use to relieve pain.

A 70-page report of the Lords Science and Technology Committee urges a
change in the law to allow derivatives of the drug to be used legally. But
it stops short of saying the drug, banned in any form for more than a
quarter of a century, should be permitted for recreational use.

Labour MP Paul Flynn, whose wife, Samantha, has endured a year of painful
chemotherapy which he says could have been relieved if cannabis had been
legally available, said yesterday: "This is a major breakthrough: I'm very
pleased."

Gordon Prentice MP, secretary of the Commons MS group, which has lobbied
for cannabis to be used to relieve multiple sclerosis, said: "There will be
a huge sigh of relief from thousands of people. The question is whether the
Government has the courage to act on good advice, because all its rhetoric
is anti-drugs."

The Lords committee findings will increase pressure on the Health
Department, which claims the evidence in favour of medical benefits from
cannabis is too weak to justify a change in the law.

But the British Medical Association concluded last year that "individual
cannabinoids have a therapeutic potential in several conditions in which
other treatments are not fully adequate". It said there was "good evidence"
that several cannabinoids had analgesic and anti-inflammatory properties.
They are also believed to help muscle spasticity and prevent convulsions.

The American Food and Drug Administration has approved the oral use of
dronabinol, a cannabis derivative, to help Aids sufferers. The BMA pointed
out that no one has died of a cannabis overdose, although heavy cannabis
smoking can damage lungs and heart in the same way as cigarette smoking.

The Home Office has granted 22 licences for research studies involving
cannabis, 19 of which were still going on earlier this year. But Paul
Boateng, a former Health Minister promoted last month to the Home Office,
told MPs: "We are not prepared to accept lesser standards in relation to
cannabis for the relief of suffering than would be applied to any other
drug. That is the duty we have to patients."

Doctors have been banned from prescribing cannabis under any circumstances
since 1971, when the Tory government passed the Misuse of Drugs Acts to
discourage hippies.

The Lords committee spent eight months investigating the scientific
evidence for and against the use of cannabis, including 12 days
interviewing expert witnesses. The committee is dominated by retired
scientists rather than retired politicians. Flynn criticised the committee
yesterday for not looking into the wider social and criminal implications
of the anti-cannabis law. He said: "The report is defective in that it
deliberately excluded evidence that legalising cannabis leads to a
reduction in heroin use, because it takes away the need for users to go to
the criminal market."

But committee chairman Lord Perry of Walton, former professor of
pharmacology at Edinburgh University - who refused to discuss the report's
conclusions before publication on Tuesday - insisted it had been a
specialist inquiry that had heard from everybody with medical or scientific
knowledge.

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Checked-by: Pat Dolan