Some days I wonder if I’m going mad – and you don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know that’s not a good sign. I work in a specialist NHS service for people experiencing first episode psychosis – young people at their most vulnerable, teetering on the edge of severe and enduring mental illness, some of them already sliding towards schizophrenia. Day in and day out, I watch how cannabis has destroyed people’s minds. It is, frankly, heart-breaking. So you can perhaps imagine how I feel when those same patients mention, almost in passing, that a private doctor has prescribed them cannabis. Not for cancer pain, not for the muscle spasms of multiple sclerosis, not for the intractable epilepsy of a child for whom nothing else has worked (the conditions where there is at least a credible clinical argument) but for their mental health. For depression. For anxiety.

This is, and I do not use the phrase lightly, a prescription for disaster

This is, and I do not use the phrase lightly, a prescription for disaster

I’m sorry, what? We are handing this stuff out on prescription for the very conditions it is known to cause and worsen. It is, and I do not use the phrase lightly, a prescription for disaster. Despite the protests of the powerful pro-cannabis lobby, it has now been proved beyond any reasonable doubt that cannabis use is directly associated with depression, anxiety, psychosis and avolition, a grinding loss of motivation that can hollow a person out completely.

While cannabis can sometimes make a user feel temporary relief and give them respite from depression and anxiety, in the long term it makes them worse. It seems to me a peculiarly bitter irony that just as we as a society are becoming more understanding about mental illness, a drug directly responsible for destroying people’s mental health is not only spreading unchecked but is now being actively dispensed by doctors.

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Just recently I had a patient who had a history of psychosis. She’d been watching TikTok and become convinced that cannabis was the answer to her ADHD. A private clinic had given her a prescription without checking her notes, without calling me, and without calling her GP. It came out only by chance, in conversation. I sat there absorbing this information, thinking: a private doctor has prescribed her a powerful drug that is directly contraindicated for her condition, without contacting a single one of the clinicians actually responsible for her care. How is this right?

The latest figures, published in the Times, should alarm anyone who cares about how medicine in this country is practised. Since cannabis was legalised for medical use, just ten private doctors have signed off more than half of all cannabis-based prescriptions in the country. Ten doctors. One consultant alone accounted for one in every ten........

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