In 2022, a prodigiously talented young artist named Louis Petit was preparing to return to the UK, having been effectively exiled in the Netherlands as a teenager so he could access the medical cannabis he needed to control his epilepsy. Six years earlier, Louis, then 12, had been diagnosed with a rare form of the neurological disease when medical cannabis was still illegal in the UK. But in Rotterdam, where it was legal, doctors helped him discover that a medical cannabis oil called Bedrolite, in combination with the right mix of anti-epileptic treatment, could slow and eventually stop his seizures.
This was something his neurologists in the UK had previously considered impossible. By the time Louis won a place at City and Guilds of London Art School in 2022, the UK government had legalised medicinal cannabis, pressed by parents needing the drug to treat their epileptic children – most notably Charlotte Caldwell and Hannah Deacon. Louis assumed his troubles were behind him.
But Louis has never been able to get a prescription for medical cannabis through the NHS. Instead, like almost everyone who needs the drug in this country, his only access has come through the expensive private sector. And now the producer of Bedrolite, a Dutch company, Bedrocan, has declared bankruptcy.
This means there is a high chance that, in the near future, the drug that keeps Louis well will stop being available privately, in a huge blow to all patients who rely on it. If this was people with diabetes facing a shortage of insulin, or people with high blood pressure running out of beta blockers, politicians would be falling over themselves to be seen trying to secure the long-term supply. But because this is epilepsy and cannabis – a medicine that has been stigmatised by a 50-year “war on drugs” – successive governments have avoided the issue, allowing this current crisis to develop, despite patients warning for years that they can’t be just abandoned to the private market.
When the then home secretary, Sajid Javid, legalised medicinal cannabis in 2018, he stood up in parliament and promised patients who needed cannabis medication that their arduous fight was finally coming to an end. Since the first few patients received their prescriptions on the NHS, the vast majority of others – including Louis – have been met with a wall of refusal from the healthcare system, with doctors’ requests for public funding to prescribe cannabis medication rarely granted in practice. Until 2025, there were fewer than five prescriptions for unlicensed cannabis-based products such as Bedrolite given out across the entire NHS.
In the absence of an accessible NHS route, the private market has become the only route to treatment for most patients, costing them anything up to £4,000 a month for their medicine. The result of medicinal cannabis being handed over wholesale to the private sector is that cannabis has quietly become one of the new growth sectors in Britain, with many cannabis companies getting rich from the boom. Remote online prescriptions, 48-hour door-to-door delivery and targeted advertisements on social media have all helped grow the private customer base.
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