By Ben Stevens, with additional reporting by Nicole Farah, Managing Director of Americana Communications.
The highly anticipated Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) review into the UK’s medical cannabis framework has, for the first time, received a new target publication date.
In an update to Minister of State Sarah Jones on September 21, 2026, ACMD Chair Professor David Wood said the working group is ‘concluding its report’, and expects publication ‘by the end of the year’.
The updated timeline breaks what has been close to a year of radio silence from the Council since submissions closed on October 17, 2025. While undoubtedly welcomed by an increasingly ‘anxious’ industry, it’s unlikely to assuage growing concerns about the process to date.
Writing in a commentary to Business of Cannabis, Robert Jappie, renowned cannabis lawyer and partner at Fieldfisher, suggested it may even ‘be possible to question the lawfulness of the consultation’.
Jappie’s is just one of a series of commentaries gathered this month from voices across the industry on their hopes and expectations for the ACMD review.
What does the industry want to see addressed in the review?
Across the responses gathered by Business of Cannabis this month, industry stakeholders identified three key areas they hope the ACMD review will address.
Expanding prescribing
One recurring theme was expanding the scope of doctors able to prescribe medical cannabis. Currently, medical cannabis can be prescribed under the unlicensed ‘specials’ framework for any condition deemed to have a special clinical need, but only by specialist doctors on the General Medical Council specialist register.
In practice, this dynamic funnels prescriptions through a small number of specialist prescribers, an issue which has often been criticised in the mainstream media, and that we’ve covered in detail previously.
Expanding prescribing permission to GP’s, in line with markets like Germany, would help solve this issue while greatly expanding access for patients.
Mike Morgan-Giles, Chief Executive of the Cannabis Industry Council (CIC), explained: “This would help ensure more personalised and effective care can be put in place for those in need.”
This would also ‘help move patients off dangerous opioids and anti-depressants’. Alongside GP prescribing, the CIC wants electronic prescribing enacted, which Morgan-Giles says ‘would reduce burdens on clinicians and would improve data security’, and the national patient registry extended beyond NHS care to capture private prescribing.
The CQC’s August 2025 annual update identified ‘gaps in oversight, clinical justification, and compliance with advertising rules’ across the private cannabis clinics on its register, while the General Pharmaceutical Council’s 2025 themed review of 25 medical cannabis pharmacies found seven failing governance standards and three failing training and staff-competence standards.
The CIC argues that addressing these issues simply requires enforcement, not an overhaul of regulation: “The CIC would like to see the existing framework enforced effectively by regulators.”
James Leavesley, Chief Executive of UK grower Dalgety, added: “Advertising can be corrected and oversight can be strengthened, but ultimately this is medicine. Every prescribing decision needs to be clinically justified for that individual patient, properly documented, appropriately reviewed and followed up.”
Strengthening the evidence base
A second recurring theme was the need to close the evidence gap between what is happening in clinical practice and what is captured at the national level.
Leavesley continued: “The overwhelming majority of CBPM prescribing takes place privately, yet our national patient registry is principally designed around NHS care. That means a significant body of real-world prescribing experience is not being captured consistently.”
As such, he hoped the review would focus on ‘better data collection, stronger clinical governance, improved oversight of prescribing and further measures designed to strengthen the evidence base’ rather than any wholesale rewrite of the regulations. Mirroring the CIC’s position, he said he expects ‘evolution rather than revolution’.
Beyond strengthening the data around the UK market, Morgan-Giles hopes long-standing calls for clinical evidence to be expanded beyond randomised controlled trials will finally be addressed.
“The entourage effect shows that the compounds within medical cannabis work more effectively together,” he said, “yet such an approach would not meet the requirements of a ‘gold standard’ (RCT) clinical trial.”
Product standards and delivery
The third area on which the responses converged was the standards and delivery routes for the medicines themselves. Leavesley called consistency of the medicine ‘under-discussed’.
“Clinical evidence becomes much harder to interpret if the products generating that evidence are themselves variable.”
He went on to call for a clearer conversation about pharmaceutical standards throughout the supply chain, ‘including where GACP ends, where GMP begins, how those standards are evidenced and whether equivalent requirements are being applied irrespective of where a product was cultivated.’
Javier Rodriguez of Storz & Bickel UK, which manufactures medically certified vaporisers, suggested the review should give ‘formal recognition of medically approved vaporisation as the standard administration method for cannabis flower prescriptions’.
He argued that this would ‘improve patient safety, increase prescribing confidence and support more consistent clinical outcomes across the UK medical cannabis pathway’.
Rodriguez said the sector had spent too little time on how patients consume prescribed cannabis, calling out delivery methods as an under-addressed lever for consistency and harm reduction.
Turning advice into law
While the industry is clear about what it feels the ACMD needs to address and, critically, how this could best be achieved, doubt remains over whether their input will be heard by the Council.
In turn, given historical precedent, doubts also remain over whether the ACMD’s recommendations will be implemented by the government.
Stakeholders, Jappie notes, were given just 30 days to submit written responses to a review whose remit spans the entire post-2018 CBPM framework.
This, he says, could be grounds for the review to be legally challenged based on ‘fairness, adequate time to respond, and genuine consideration of the responses received.’
A four-week window on a review of this scope, he argued, leaves each of those tests exposed. “A flawed evidence base underpinning decisions made, or a departure from expectations set during the process, is precisely the kind of thing public law challenges are built on.”
While there is no indication from any of our respondents that they intend to seek a judicial review, Jappie argues that this should shape how the sector approaches both the review’s publication and any ministerial response to it.
Beyond the process, he cited the government’s pitiful track record in implementing the council’s recommendations. The ACMD’s December 2021 recommendation of a 50-microgram THC limit per serving for consumer CBD products saw no response from the Home Office until October 2023. Even then, he explained, it was only accepted in principle.
“Almost three years on from that acceptance and closing in on five years since the original advice, no legislation has been laid to actually implement it.”
A similar pattern, he noted, has followed the ACMD’s May 2025 advice on semi-synthetic cannabinoids.
“The government accepted the ACMD’s position in August 2025 but still hasn’t acted to implement it.”
HHC remains uncontrolled by name under the Misuse of Drugs Act, and THCA is not controlled at all. Even where recommendations are accepted, ‘in this sector it has taken years (if at all) to translate that acceptance into an actual change in the law’.
With this in mind, he believes that ‘whatever the review recommends, there is likely to be substantial time and space for engagement with the Home Office and DHSC before any of it bites’.
“None of this is a reason for the industry to be complacent about what the review might say, but it is a reason not to treat publication day as the end of the story.”
This is part two of our UK Medical Cannabis Under Review series you can read part one here.
