Was there ever a more fatuous contribution to a political debate than Lord Hague following up the case of 12-year-old Billy Caldwell — the boy whose mother says he needs cannabis oil to control his epilepsy — with a demand for recreational cannabis to be legalised? But the former foreign secretary has done us a favour of sorts. He has inadvertently explained why Billy Caldwell has become such a cause célèbre over the past few days: the drug-legalisation lobby has cottoned on to his huge propaganda potential.
The reason why cannabis oil is not licensed for use as a treatment for epilepsy in Britain has nothing to do with the prohibition of cannabis as a recreational drug. Opiates are banned as recreational drugs but that does not prevent their routine use as a painkiller in controlled doses. Moreover, there is a cannabis-derived medicine, Sativex, which is licensed in Britain for pain relief in patients with multiple sclerosis. Cannabis oil is not licensed as a treatment for epilepsy for a more fundamental reason: there is not, as yet, good scientific evidence for its efficacy.
Science has been a remarkable missing element from the Caldwell case — remarkable because on any other subject we never hear the end of the phrase ‘evidence-based policymaking’. All we have had in this case — from the Today programme to the House of Commons — is anecdotal evidence from the mother of Billy Caldwell and the parents of other epilepsy-sufferers who claim that cannabis oil has worked wonders on their children. This has all been one-sided because the doctors treating the children are not going to speak to me or any other reporter who rings them up for their side of the story, for reasons of patient confidentiality.
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