Eleven per cent (172,755) of all ‘cannabis medicines’ prescribed in the UK since 2019 have been issued by a single prescriber, The Times has reported.
Data from the NHS Business Services Authority obtained by the newspaper revealed that the most prolific prescriber authorised “nearly 46,000 cannabis medications” within the first five months of 2025, which The Times said “amounts to a prescription every two working minutes”.
Overall, medicinal cannabis prescriptions from private clinics increased from fewer than 400 per month in 2020, to 85,000 items per month by the start of 2025.
Market operation
Professor of Psychiatric Research at King’s College London, Sir Robin Murray, commented: “One doesn’t go to a clinic called after the name of a drug. There are no penicillin clinics or steroid clinics.
“But here we have clinics set up to prescribe what the patients say they want, i.e. cannabis, irrespective of whether there is any evidence that cannabis can help the complaint.”
And Professor Trevor Jones, former Head of Research and Development at the Wellcome Foundation, observed: “We have watched this market double, then double again, then double again.
“What began as an exceptional prescribing mechanism for patients with unmet clinical expectations has become a parallel pharmaceutical market operating without marketing authorisation or a clinical evidence base.”
‘Weak evidence’
A study recently published in The Lancet Psychiatry questioned the use of medicinal cannabis as an effective treatment for drug addiction and mental ill-health.
Researchers from Australia and the UK reviewed data from more than 50 trials in order to test “the efficacy and safety of cannabinoids as the primary treatment” for mental disorders or substance use disorders.
The academic paper reported “no benefit of cannabinoids” for some conditions, including opioid addiction, bipolar, anxiety, PTSD, and anorexia nervosa.
While it reported a reduction in symptoms for a small number of disorders, researchers noted that “the quality of this evidence was generally low”.
Earlier this week, the European Congress of Psychiatry heard from Researcher Ana Aquino Servin that long-term daily cannabis users may lack motivation to tackle complex tasks such as planning and decision making.
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