It would be a rare Sloane who didn’t have an ex-hippie aunt all too ready to reminisce about the hazy times she spent in a hash den in Kabul. And it would be an even rarer Sloane who has never clasped a spliff between their lips. But it would be a very unusual (and perhaps rather slow) City-based Sloane who had not begun to examine the investment possibilities of cannabis. Consider these figures: the already-legalised trade in many parts of the US may, according to some projections, be worth as much as $25bn (£20bn) by 2020. (The US’s illegal cannabis market is currently valued at around $41bn). Dutch tax revenues from legalised cannabis are estimated at £300m a year. And a 2016 report by the Adam Smith Institute claimed that the illicit UK market was worth £6.8bn a year, which, if legalised, could bring in as much as £1bn in taxes to the Treasury – and could, as the Lib Dems recently proposed, be spent on education. Prosecuting and imprisoning cannabis offenders costs British taxpayers millions a year, and according to research conducted by the Lib Dems, around a million hours of police time a year is ‘wasted enforcing cannabis prohibition’. Yes, cannabis - a substance that brings joy and relief, and is entirely legal for medical use in 29 states in the US, not to mention in Canada, Uruguay, Israel, Germany and many other nations. (Its recreational use is also legal in eight US states.)

Some are so confident of its qualities and its eventual, inevitable legalisation in the UK that they’re putting their money behind it. Take Kingsley Capital Partners, a British private- equity and venture-capital firm that began investing in the emerging legalised-cannabis market in 2015 and is the only firm outside the US to be doing so on a formal basis. How much KCP have invested is, at the time of writing, under wraps, but their actions speak loudly: at the beginning of this year, they founded Oxford Cannabinoid Technologies (OCT) in partnership with Oxford University to study the properties of cannabinoids and bring cannabinoid-derived medication to the market – a first for the university. Even Sir Patrick Stewart, head Trekkie, has endorsed the research, having used cannabinoid-based medication legally for the past two years to alleviate the pain of his arthritis. ‘This is,’ he said, ‘an important step forward for Britain in a field of research too long held back by prejudice, fear and ignorance.’


Another big supporter of the research is Gavin Sathianathan, CEO of Forma Holdings, a company that builds businesses in markets where the medical use of cannabis is legal. ‘This is going to be a game changer,’ he says. ‘Particularly when it comes to the nature of the debate. People cannot say it has no medical value when our number-one medical college in the UK has an institute dedicated to researching it.’

It’s not just Oxford’s research that excites Sathianathan. Forma Holdings, also co-founded with KCP and established in 2016, takes an international view of the cannabis market, with offices in London and LA, and has three main divisions: retail and cultivation; pharmaceutical and life sciences; and investments in ambitious entrepreneurs who are shaping the cannabis industry. Many of these pioneers are focusing, for instance, on edibles – such as gummies, mints, chocs and the like, all of them branded to appeal to aficionados. Such products are very much a growth area in the US, believed to account for about half the money brought in by this exploding industry. Sathianathan was previously the MD of Tesco’s Blinkbox Books, part of its digital-entertainment business, as well as having been at Facebook early on. But in 2014 he stumbled across a piece of research by John Quelch, a professor at Harvard Business School, about the skyrocketing recreational-marijuana market in Colorado. ‘I just thought it was interesting,’ he says.

Read next Rocks: 'A nuanced exploration of growing up that never feels dogmatic or appalled' Rocks: 'A nuanced exploration of growing up that never feels dogmatic or appalled' Tatler's Acting Features Director gives five stars to this coming-of-age film that follows a teenage girl and her brother's attempts at a normal life after their mother abandons them

Getty Images

Interesting? It was a eureka moment, and it inspired Sathianathan to track down Quelch, who told him that ‘this is going to be the biggest business opportunity since the birth of the net’. Sathianathan subsequently went to Colorado for three months to network and figure it all out, taking his family with him. And while he was busy hobnobbing, he says, ‘my wife, who doesn’t know the first thing about cannabis, would go to cannabis dispensaries with her friends – you know, middle-class women who live in London and were visiting us – and she’d say to me, “This is just like going to a Kate Spade shop or a beauty parlour.”’


That sold him on the industry, and after 10 years of being a techie he is now completely focused on marijuana. As he says: ‘Twenty years ago in Europe, we missed the birth of the web industry.’ And he doesn’t want to be left behind this time. He gathered some former colleagues and friends, raised money, bought a licence for a medical dispensary in Las Vegas and invested in five companies that were active in the US cannabis market. But that’s business – his main concern is that those in need of medical marijuana should have access to it. So last year he funded End Our Pain, a medically focused non-profit campaign.

Because what is perhaps more important than the money that might be made from cannabis is the claim that the drug can be used to help relieve many chronic medical conditions – a claim backed by scientists, academics and businessmen in the UK.



John Lycett Green, for instance, is very vocal on the matter and supports Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol (CISTA), a political party founded in 2015 that advocates the drug’s legalisation. He has also spoken about his mother, the writer Candida Lycett Green, who lost her battle with pancreatic cancer in 2014. The Prince of Wales’s great friend had, however, been able to lessen the terrible pain of her illness by ingesting butter enriched with cannabidiol (CBD). The CBD allowed her to eat without being in agony, to sleep at night and even to ride again. ‘She firmly believed,’ says John, ‘that cannabidiol had helped her and that, with more research, it could help lessen the suffering of other people with cancer.’

That chimes with the views of Edouard Desforges, who campaigned to be CISTA’s candidate for the London mayoral election last year. A contributor to the MedicalMarijuana.co.uk website – Britain’s largest online resource for information about medical marijuana, featuring legal advice, recipes, products, news and patients’ stories – Desforges has personal experience of the medical benefits of cannabis, having been involved, shortly after leaving school, in a car accident that left him in need of emergency spinal surgery and struggling with pain.


Perhaps the most influential campaigner is Amanda Feilding, the Countess of Wemyss and March and the founder of the Beckley Foundation, a charitable trust that undertakes scientific research into psychoactive substances and is also involved in attempting to reform global drugs policy. She is a long-term believer in the beneficial properties of many drugs. As far back as 2006, Beckley’s Global Cannabis Commission published an overview of legal policies relating to the medicinal use of cannabis and suggested ways to move forward. And a close friend of hers, she tells me, recently developed Parkinson’s ‘and has found that cannabis has helped to diminish the side effects, including shaking’.



Some believe that marijuana can help with glaucoma, irritable-bowel syndrome (IBS), chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, sickle-cell anaemia, Tourette’s, MS and Crohn’s disease. What many people don’t realise is that with medical marijuana you don’t get high in the process. The buzz (plus the munchies) that you get from recreational weed comes from tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Those eager to get stoned usually want a variety high in THC, and it is these more powerful varieties that can be very dangerous and damaging, particularly when overused – there’s much talk of mental illness caused by skunk. There are, however, other varieties that contain only a small level of THC but are rich in CBD. And it is the CBD-rich cannabis that provides the unique medical benefits. You don’t even have to smoke it – you can vape it, take it in capsule form, use it as ointment, drink it, eat it or even take it as a suppository. Dosage does need watching, though. The late drug smuggler/ writer Howard Marks suffered from bowel cancer and swallowed three weeks’ worth of cannabis oil in one night. He went temporarily mad, thought he was a chicken (according to some) and had to be sectioned.



Fans say that medical marijuana, if used properly, can be life-changing. One anonymity-demanding aristocrat who vapes CBD for her IBS explains: ‘Before, I was sick regularly and had really bad stomach pains every day. Now I am much better.’ She buys it online, as do most people she knows – specifically, from a website she found in the Daily Telegraph’s comments section, under an article discussing the shutting down of Silk Road (an online black market, largely in drugs). Being able to buy online is key. Had the pain worsened, she tells me, she would have considered uprooting her entire family and moving to the US.

But technical glitches with online buying mean that supplies can be held up for two days or more, which is serious if you are treating, say, the symptoms of your MS. And, as Feilding points out, the quality of cannabis purchased online is questionable because there is no regulation. ‘It puts a terrible burden of uncertainty on patients,’ she says. It also turns those who use such websites, even for this most benign of reasons, into criminals – which is why they insist on remaining anonymous.



Like the equestrian who suffered a life-altering riding accident and now regularly uses a medical-marijuana spray to lessen the pain, though she is also quite happy to have a ‘couple of tokes on a spliff’ now and then as a ‘temporary distraction’. Like the ex-Benenden Somerset dweller whose arthritis causes her ‘savage pain’, eased by ‘six to 10 spliffs a day, and thank goodness for it’. And the pregnant Notting Hill-based yogi who uses CBD in capsule form to help with morning sickness. Cannabis? While pregnant? Surely that’s not wise. ‘You have to trust your common sense on CBDs,’ she says, ‘I have been experimenting and they’ve really helped my nausea.’ Combating nausea is also one of the reasons why cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy use medical marijuana.

Because of the legal status of the drug, it’s hard to know what’s damaging and what is not – research into its possible uses is going slowly. It’s a ‘really mad Kafkaesque situation’, says Feilding, ‘because you can’t do the research to show the value of the things. And the process is so very expensive. And it takes years to get permission’. Although, of course, permission is exactly what the research partnership between OCT and Oxford University effectively has. But until that research is published, medical marijuana is locked in a catch-22 situation – as typified by the response I got from a doctor (who did not want to be named) who said that he couldn’t vouch for marijuana’s medicinal properties without further research findings. This can leave those who would love to try CBD for health reasons in a bind. One Parkinson’s patient I spoke to is taking such a complex range of conventional drugs already that doctors aren’t willing to let him try CBD because they don’t know how it will react with his current medication. Even in the Czech Republic, where medical cannabis has been legal since 2013, doctors, unsure of how and when to issue CBD, have only written prescriptions for around 150 patients over the past four years.



In Germany, the law legalising cannabis for medicinal purposes became effective in March – at which point the government had to strike deals with a number of foreign companies in order to meet demand until such time as German manufacturers are able to produce the amount required. But when Germany does manage to make enough CBD domestically, well... ‘The Germans are going to create the world’s largest legal cannabis market, and it will be like Audi and Mercedes,’ says Sathianathan. ‘Germany will be pivotal, driving the EU to do this.’ And he hopes that the EU ‘does it sensibly’, unlike in the US, where each state has its own laws, and that instead the EU ‘comes up with a single framework allowing us, for instance, to set up a business in the Czech Republic, which is cheap and low-cost, but then ship to Germany and Sweden, where it is more expensive’. (This, however, will be trickier should Britain leave the single market under the final terms of the Brexit negotiations.)



Ireland is also about to legalise medical marijuana, putting regulated cannabis products for those with cancer, MS and fibromyalgia on the market. Even China condones it. Or did – the Emperor Shen Neng, in 2737 bc, is said to have used cannabis tea for his gout; in ad 200, the Chinese surgeon Hua Tuo was recorded as using cannabis as an anaesthetic (the direct translation of mazui, the Chinese word for anaesthesia, is ‘cannabis intoxication’). India also recognised its medical powers, and bhang – a preparation made from a mix of cannabis paste, milk, ghee and spices – is said not only to make the consumer happy, but also to remove wind.



Might legalisation happen here anytime soon? ‘Theresa May was not good on the issue as home secretary,’ says Feilding. ‘In fact, she was very bad – criminalising all psychoactive substances, turning it back to the Middle Ages.’ And despite Feilding having hoped that, as Prime Minister, May ‘would listen to experts and change her views, with the main thing being to reschedule these substances so doctors can prescribe them’, it hasn’t happened.



Instead, May recently announced that the Conservatives will refuse to legalise cannabis. Which is bad news for Feilding, and dispiriting for Sathianathan too. The latter, however, is biding his time and is confident that opinion will swing his way if the right arguments are used. As a good example of this, he points to Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, whose pitch to legalise cannabis focused on two objectives: to take the drug out of the hands of criminals and, by policing the market, to take it out of the hands of kids. ‘I think there is no more conservative argument than that for the Daily Mail’s readers,’ Sathianathan suggests. What might be even more effective is yet more medical research of the kind that has shown that cannabis use by people over 65 is effective against some of the behavioural symptoms (agitation, aggression) of dementia and Alzheimer’s, and may actually reverse the cognitive decline associated with old age. And dementia is a hot political topic.



However huge the financial and criminological pluses of legalising marijuana may be, the most important benefit is really for the sick. They suffer while politicians dither – which is far from dope. In fact, it’s deeply un-dope, as John Lycett Green says, to let ‘taboos stand in the way of the possibility of a better life for thousands of people who now know only pain’. Here’s hoping.