Key Takeaways
- Britain’s medical cannabis review has been delayed, moving from a summer 2026 deadline to the end of 2026 without explanation.
- The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is assessing the impact of the 2018 reforms, which aimed to improve access to cannabis-based medicinal products.
- Currently, fewer than five patients receive NHS-funded cannabis prescriptions, highlighting significant access issues compared to the growing private market.
- Families await answers on whether private prescribing affects NHS clinical trials, as many rely on expensive private prescriptions.
- The delay raises accountability questions, with calls for clarity on what caused the timeline shift and how patient feedback is being considered.
Britain’s medical-cannabis patients have waited nearly eight years for a straight answer on whether the country’s 2018 reforms actually worked. They just got a little more waiting instead.
On September 21st, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs told Policing Minister Sarah Jones that its working group reviewing cannabis-based products for medicinal use is “concluding” its report, with publication now expected by the end of 2026. That’s a quiet but meaningful shift. Back in March, the ACMD’s own work programme listed the same review as due by summer 2026. A written answer to Parliament on June 1 confirmed that same summer timeline. Now the window has widened, and nobody outside the ACMD has been told why.
For families paying upward of £1,500 a month for private prescriptions because NHS access remains almost nonexistent, a few extra months might not sound like much. But this is the second time the goalposts have moved on a review that was already five years overdue when it started.
What Did the ACMD’s September Update Actually Say?
The letter to Sarah Jones was brief. It grouped the cannabis-based products for medicinal use review alongside two other government-commissioned workstreams, the drivers of powder cocaine use and internet-facilitated drugs markets, and stated all three working groups are “concluding their reports,” with publication expected “by the end of the year.”
That’s the entire substance of the update as it relates to medical cannabis. There’s no interim findings, no evidence summary, no breakdown of which stakeholder submissions carried the most weight, and no acknowledgment that the timeline has already shifted once. Compare that to the ACMD’s March 2026 work programme letter, which listed the same review with a clear “Summer 2026” completion target. Whatever caused the gap between those two dates, the public record doesn’t say.
Why Was This Review Expected by Summer 2026 in the First Place?
The review traces back to a June 2, 2025 commissioning letter from then-Minister of State Dame Diana Johnson, who asked the ACMD to assess whether the 2018 rescheduling of cannabis-based products for medicinal use had the “desired impact.” That 2018 change moved CBPMs from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 of the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001, opening the door for specialist doctors to prescribe unlicensed cannabis medicines where a genuine clinical need existed.
Johnson’s letter noted that the ACMD’s own 2020 review had already flagged insufficient evidence to judge the reform’s impact, with much of that evidence expected to “fully emerge in several years.” Five years later, the government decided those years had passed.
The ACMD launched a public call for evidence in September 2025, running through October 2025, and folded those submissions into its analysis. By March 2026, the working group’s own projection was summer completion. That date has now come and gone without a report, replaced by a vaguer end-of-year target.
How Severe Is the NHS Access Problem Right Now?
This is the part that makes the delay sting. According to government figures, fewer than five patients nationally currently receive NHS-funded prescriptions for unlicensed cannabis-based medicines. The private market has exploded in the meantime. NHS Business Services Authority data shows that private clinics dispensed over 300,000 CBPM items between April 2023 and April 2024, more than double the prior year, across roughly 40 specialist private clinics.
That gap between near-zero NHS access and a rapidly growing private market is precisely what the ACMD was asked to investigate. Johnson’s commissioning letter specifically asked whether the availability of private prescriptions has reduced the incentive to run the clinical trials needed to bring cannabis medicines into NHS use. It’s a fair question. But every month without an answer forces families to choose between paying out of pocket or going without.
Families of children with treatment-resistant epilepsy, whose campaigns drove the original 2018 law change, have been especially vocal about this gap. Matt Hughes of the Medcan Family Foundation has argued the review must prioritize input from these families directly, calling it “completely unacceptable” if their voices get lost in the process.
What Exactly Is the ACMD Being Asked to Decide?
Johnson’s original commission set three core questions for the working group. First, did the 2018 legislative change achieve its intended effect? Second, what unintended consequences emerged that nobody anticipated at the time? Third, has the growth of private prescribing undercut the incentive to run clinical trials that could eventually bring these medicines onto the NHS formulary?
The review’s scope also touches practical machinery that affects the entire sector: prescribing pathways, NHS commissioning decisions, private clinic oversight, clinical trial design, import routes for unlicensed products, domestic cultivation licensing, and the broader controlled-drug scheduling framework.
A parliamentary question tabled by Conservative MP Stuart Andrew in May 2026 pushed further, asking whether the review would also examine prescribing to patients with serious mental illness, clinic advertising practices, and cross-regulatory accountability.
The government’s answer confirmed that the Department of Health, NHS England, and the MHRA all sit as observers on the working group, though it didn’t clarify how the group is weighing those additional concerns.
Why Does This Delay Actually Matter?
Every part of the medical-cannabis supply chain depends on this report landing at some point. Specialist clinics have been operating in a regulatory gray zone for years, expanding a private market that regulators openly worry may be crowding out clinical trials.
Researchers, meanwh2ile, face licensing timelines that put the UK at a real disadvantage. According to the Cannabis Research and Development Group, Schedule 1 licence applications in the UK take up to 14 months to process, compared with two to three months in Canada and the Netherlands, with initial fees exceeding £3,000 per site.
Professor Trevor Jones of the CRDG has pointed out that the ACMD already delivered actionable recommendations on these research barriers back in February 2024, including a proposal to exempt universities and hospitals from Schedule 1 licensing requirements.
Those recommendations, he’s noted, have sat unimplemented for roughly two years while the new review proceeds in parallel. His argument is straightforward: the government could act on known fixes right now instead of waiting for a fourth report to tell it what the third one already said.
The UK’s position also looks weaker next to peer countries. Australia now reports more than 1 million patients receiving medicinal cannabis prescriptions across upward of 200 health conditions, helped by rules that let GPs prescribe without a specialist referral and a national data-reporting system through the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
The UK Cannabis Industry Council has called for similar reforms, including GP-initiated prescribing, NHS reimbursement pathways for private prescriptions, and electronic prescribing systems.
What Should Patients and Clinicians Be Asking Now?
The most recent September update leaves several accountability questions wide open, and they deserve direct answers rather than another vague timeline in December.
What specifically caused the slip from summer to year-end, given the working group had months of advance notice on its own deadline? How did the review team weight evidence from patient groups, clinicians, and private-market submissions, particularly given the volume of responses collected during the autumn 2025 call for evidence?
Are policymakers treating the private prescribing boom as evidence of unmet need, or as the barrier to NHS access and clinical trials that Johnson’s original commission implied?And will the final report include a concrete implementation timeline, or will it join the 2018, 2020, and 2024 reports whose recommendations have already gathered dust?
Britain didn’t just miss a deadline here. It replaced a specific promise with a looser one, without explaining the difference. That’s a pattern worth watching closely as December approaches, because “by year-end” is exactly the kind of timeline that can slip again with just as little warning.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs has pushed back its review of cannabis-based medical products from summer 2026 to the end of 2026, as noted in a September 21 update to the Policing Minister.
The ACMD’s September 2026 update gave no reason for the delay, stating only that the working group is “concluding” its report on cannabis-based medicinal products, with no interim findings made public.
According to government figures, fewer than five patients nationally receive NHS-funded prescriptions for unlicensed cannabis-based medicines. Instead, the vast majority access them through roughly 40 private specialist clinics.
This review looks at the impact of the UK’s 2018 cannabis medicine reforms, assessing whether rescheduling these products achieved its intended goals and exploring any unintended consequences, such as whether private prescribing has hindered NHS clinical trials.
Once published, the government will review the ACMD’s findings and recommendations before deciding on any policy or legislative changes. Previous ACMD reports on cannabis-based medicinal products, published in 2018, 2020, and 2024, have included recommendations that in some cases remain unimplemented years later.
