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Brexit: the perfect opportunity for UK to be centre of European cannabis

Drug policy reform group, Volteface, has called on Boris Johnson to take control of the medical cannabis and CBD market to provide an economic boost for the UK.

The Volteface report entitled ‘The new leaf: beyond Brexit, countering COVID‘, which features a foreword from the Adam Smith Institute, has called attention to the economic benefits of engaging with growing cannabis markets. Stressing that the UK will need to move quickly, it estimates that the medical cannabis market could reach up to £1.2bn, creating 41,000 direct jobs and a further 17,000 supporting jobs.

So far, the UK has taken some steps to embrace the sector, with a number of cannabis companies listing on the LSE. However, the report highlights that, with the CBD wellness market forecast to reach £1bn by 2025, outdated licensing regimes mean that the UK is missing out on the medical cannabis opportunity.

Speaking with Cannabis Wealth, Katya Kowalski of Volteface said that now that Brexit is in place, it creates the perfect opportunity for the UK to become the centre of European cannabis. 

She said: “It frees us from direct EU regulations and restrictions. Countries like Switzerland are allowed to operate much more freely in the medical cannabis and CBD space. This would allow the UK to operate on its own and independently. It leaves us in a place where we can take control of the industry and ownership.

“It is a really important sector to expand quickly. Medical cannabis was legalised three years ago and while we have seen progress from the industry side, patient access is still really limited. It is important to expand quickly to make sure patients are getting access to the medicine they need.”

German political parties working in coalition announced that adult use cannabis will be legalised for sale in licensed premises and taxed accordingly. It makes Germany the first major European country to recognise this growing industry. 

“Competition is increasing across Europe. Germany has now put plans in place to legalise recreational cannabis and there is an ongoing Danish pilot programme for building an evidence base around medical cannabis. France is also doing something similar. We are seeing a lot of moves across Europe to really expand and take on medical cannabis as a growing industry,” said Kowalski.

Could the German announcement put further pressure on Boris Johnson to make changes in the UK? Kowalski hopes that this is the case. 

“It should, and hopefully will, put pressure on Boris Johnson to see the benefits of medical cannabis. We mentioned in our report that there is a predicted estimated value of £1.2bn with thousands of new jobs. This should bring medical cannabis into perspective around it being a viable economic opportunity.”

Such economic opportunity would help with recouping financial losses following a series of lockdowns across the UK in 2020 and early 2021. Kowalski highlighted that this would be especially important around the creation of jobs following the furlough scheme which ended in September 2021. The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, often referred to as ‘furlough’, supported the wages of more than 11.7 million people since 1 March 2020 at a cost of more than £70bn. 

“The report estimated that we could get 41,000 jobs specifically in the medical cannabis industry with a further 17,000 ancillary jobs. It is not just about economic or investment opportunities, but a wide array of job creation. That is something that has been really lacking in the UK with the furlough scheme and people losing their jobs.

“It is important to discuss that cannabis is a really interdisciplinary sector which can seem quite niche from the outside. The opportunities in the industry are so vast that you could have quite low-skilled to high-level positions including agricultural to lab-based jobs. It is not just the ancillary jobs but also positions in the industries that may collaborate with the cannabis space.”

The report suggested the appointment of a separate government body that deals solely with cannabis would streamline the process of applications in turn speeding up the industry. 

Katya continued: “The next steps need to be a policy framework put in place in the UK. One of the key recommendations in the report is that a cannabis Tsar or a government body should be put in place to oversee the medical cannabis expansion. At the moment, all regulatory matters go to the home office which is quite tiresome and slow.

“The home office doesn’t really know how to deal with these issues so having a separate governmental body would really help to streamline this approach and speed up the process. Also, raising the THC percentage of CBD that is allowed to be extracted from hemp up to 1 per cent from 0.2 per cent would maximise the yield and expand the market.” 

Kowalski also drew attention to the importance of not forgetting patient involvement as there is no industry without patients. 

She concluded: “It is really important to not lose sight of why we are all in this space and what is at the heart of this industry, which is patient access. Expanding the evidence base for cannabis products is important to expanding patient access. We need to make doctors more comfortable with prescribing. We need to amend those regulations too so expanding the evidence base with investment into the sector is absolutely key.”

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