As reported by Cannabis Health 

Thousands more doctors in the Czech Republic will soon be permitted to prescribe medical cannabis under a new decree published by the Ministry of Health.

From April 2025, the country’s 5,000 general practitioners will be permitted to prescribe medical cannabis to patients with chronic pain, following years of lobbying from patients and healthcare professionals.

Medical cannabis has been legal in Czechia since 2013 but currently only specialists are permitted to prescribe. As a result only 200 doctors are actively prescribing cannabis-based medicines— a figure which has remained the same for several years.

Around 8,000 Czech patients are officially reported to be legally prescribed cannabis-based medicines, but a previous survey by the National Drug Monitoring Center found that around 600,000 Czechs use cannabis for medical purposes, and over a million had tried it for self-treatment in the past year.

It is hoped that the new legislation, which has been supported by the Czech Association of General Practitioners, will significantly improve access to legal cannabis treatments.

The decree will also reduce some of the administrative burdens on doctors, allowing for prescriptions to be issued for up to three months at a time.

A welcome step forward

The news has been welcomed by advocates of medical cannabis who have been pushing for a less restrictive framework to widen access.

Lukas Hurt, editor of Konopi Magazine and manager of Czechia’s hemp cluster, CzecHemp told Cannabis Health: “It’s obvious that [the number of doctors prescribing] is the biggest obstacle to any increase in the number of patients and overall access to the medical cannabis program in the Czech Republic.

“It was a long fight following push back from the Ministry of Health which was opposed to any progress in this area. Although we didn’t achieve everything we wanted, this is really good news.”

For now, GPs will be restricted to only prescribing cannabis for the management of chronic pain, however, Hurt is confident that it will still have a significant impact on patient numbers.

“The immediate impact can be hard to forecast, because the doctors need to be open to prescribing it and we know that many of the older generations are still not. [But] allowing an additional 5,000 doctors to prescribe medical cannabis should have a huge impact on the number of patients,” he continued.

“Although they will only be able to prescribe it for chronic pain, we know that around 80% of patients are experiencing chronic pain which can be attributed to other diagnoses, such as Crohn’s disease.”

Meanwhile, CzecHemp is continuing to advocate for further amendments to the legislation, including for cannabis-based medicines to be prescribed to children with serious health conditions such as cancer and epilepsy.

Hurt adds: “We welcome this step forward, but it doesn’t mean that the fight stops.”