Guardian Report: Inside one of the first licensed medical cannabis labs in Britain

Celadon is one of the few firms that grow medical cannabis in the UK but, unlike others, uses an indoor lab rather than greenhouses. This means it can produce five to six harvests each year and a much higher yield, it says, although an indoor lab is more expensive to run.

The company is following in the footsteps of GW Pharmaceuticals, a trailblazer that developed the first cannabis-based medicine to be licensed in the UK in 2010, Sativex for multiple sclerosis, which costs about £2,000 a year. However, NHS prescribing of the mouth spray remains very limited and varies across the country.

Javid’s decision to legalise medical cannabis in 2018 came after a long-running campaign waged by the parents of children diagnosed with severe epilepsy, who reported that cannabis oil helped with their condition. However, medical cannabis can only be prescribed by specialist doctors, patients often pay for it themselves, and it cannot be imported until a prescription has been issued, on a named-patient basis.

James Short, the 54-year-old founder and chief executive of Celadon, was sceptical at first. “In early 2018, my son approached me and asked me did I want to invest in the medical cannabis sector? I said it’s not for me,” he says. “When the government legalised it, he came back to me and I said: ‘Let’s look at it.’ I spoke to many patients who have used medicinal cannabis, especially for chronic pain, and it was those patients that persuaded me that it wasn’t snake oil – it really worked and had changed their lives.”

Read the full article

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/may/09/inside-one-of-the-first-licensed-medical-cannabis-labs-in-britain

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