Dr. Lorraine Nolan:

Chairman, you have raised some very valid points. I take your point about the very small content of THC that is here. As head of the medicines regulatory agency, I am not necessarily looking at this from the point of view of the psychoactive substance content. We all acknowledge that what patients deserve most is evidence-supported treatments. For me, fundamentally, this is not necessarily about this being a THC-containing product or not. There are many controlled drugs under the misuse of drugs legislation that are regular conventional medicines. I refer to one of the opiate products, fentanyl. They have all reached the evidential standard that is required to achieve a medicines authorisation. Fundamentally, we have to preserve those standards. If cannabis wants to be a medicine, it has to reach the same evidential standards of all medicines. It has to prove it works and that it is safe. It comes back to that for us. It is about the lack of an evidence base. Unfortunately, being a controlled substance is one element of it, but the evidence base is not strong enough for this to be the more routine process in terms of access that we all know for other medicines. Until that advances further, they are the circumstances. This will never be a freely accessible programme.

I accept the point that we have started something with MCAP that needs to get under way. We have to reform that experience, and we can look at how we can route that along, support it and much of what Mr. O'Connor said. However, we must be careful in this debate that we preserve the standards we all expect for the medicines that we take and that we can rely on them to be safe and to work.