I’m a Tory MP, and I’ll go abroad and get Alfie Dingley’s banned cannabis oil for him myself On Monday, I announced in the Commons that I intend to lead a delegation of cross-party MPs to go abroad […]

On Monday, I announced in the Commons that I intend to lead a delegation of cross-party MPs to go abroad and get Alfie Dingley’s medical cannabis if the Home Office do not allow him access to it by Wednesday.

Alfie, 6, suffers from a rare form of epilepsy. He has up to 150 seizures per month. His condition only improved when he was in the Netherlands and received cannabis oil medication, which is banned in the UK.

It is now three months since the Prime Minister welcomed the family to Downing Street, sat with them, and told them that the Government would accept an application for a special licence on compassionate grounds. She later confirmed that it would be looked at swiftly.

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The demands laid out by the Home Office

But the Home Office has still not granted Alfie his licence despite the family complying with what the Home Office has demanded. Most people will be flabbergasted to learn of just how onerous those demands have been. Not one licence application, but three, one each for each of the members of the medical and pharmacy team. And not just a simple document to set out how the medical team would work, but a 25-side document.

‘The family have not had to cope with just excessive bureaucracy – there’s the small matter of having to raise about £20,000 too’

Added to that, the need to identify and secure a psychologist to regularly monitor Alfie’s health. Plus police checks for all concerned. And special import licences for the pharmacist. And, perhaps in a measure that sums up the entirely disproportionate nature of this, the need for a ‘compliance’ visit to assess the physical security of the local pharmacy, a pharmacy that regularly holds the medical equivalent of heroin. Then, just to add icing to this cake of ‘over the top’ bureaucracy, the compliance visit can’t take place until the lead professor is back from holiday.

The family has shown unbelievable strength

But there’s more. The family have not had to cope with just excessive bureaucracy – there’s the small matter of having to raise about £20,000 too, this to cover the application costs. Unbelievably, and to the great credit of this remarkable family, they have raised the money and coped with the bureaucracy. They have acted with quiet dignity despite their daily extreme anxiety over their son’s fragile health.

‘The laws around medical cannabis are callous and outdated and we have a duty to protect our citizens’

The Home Office Minister Nick Hurd pointed out that we are lawmakers and not lawbreakers. I agree. But the laws around medical cannabis are callous and outdated and we have a duty to protect our citizens. The current laws fly in the face of sound medical evidence from around the world. The Home Office reaction is incompatible with the urgency of the situation.

Medical cannabis should be a matter of health, not criminal justice. It is vital that cannabis is removed from the list of substances believed to have no medical value, Schedule 1. And there is an urgent need to put together a system that allows swift access to medical cannabis under prescription from a medical professional. The small steps announced today about creating an expert panel to guide ministers is far too little, being done far too slowly. We need a bold and decisive change in the law and in the short term a swift decision to grant full long-term access to families like those of Alfie, Sophia Gibson and Billy Caldwell.