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Prescribed cannabis outlawed in Ireland

Doctors who disagree with health officials’ hostile stance on medicinal cannabis should ‘start with the Irish literature’, according to the campaigner highlighting patients’ impasse with Irish Customs to the European Commission.

Mr Noel McCullagh, who lives with multiple sclerosis, said that an Irish doctor brought the treatment into accepted medical practice 170 years ago. Now the Commission is to investigate the State’s compliance with the Schengen Agreement in stopping citizens from returning to Ireland with cannabis extracts legitimately prescribed elsewhere in the European Union.

From Holland, Mr McCullagh told IMT that a restricted cannabinoid research scheme in Waterford Regional Hospital had delivered results on treatment benefits. “But when this is considered as an issue of civil protection as outlined in the citizens’ rights of the [European] Treaties... it’s fought tooth and nail.” He said doctors were better placed to appreciate that the extract of cannabis used in treatment was ‘very different from the illicit drug’.

Mr McCullagh said concerned doctors had helped create awareness in the UK by writing prescriptions for medicinal cannabis on principle before pharmacists could supply it.

Posted in Public Health on 05 June 2008
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