Pressure is piling on the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to publish its highly anticipated review of the country’s medical cannabis framework.
The Home Office-commissioned review of the UK’s cannabis-based products for medicinal use (CBPMs) framework was set to be published by ‘summer 2026’, and as that deadline passes without word from the ACMD, the nature of the process itself is being brought into question.
New Freedom of Information records show that the review was commissioned with no scoping note, no annex, no exclusions and no timetable acknowledgement, meaning the review stands on materially lighter terms than the previous commissions on the same subject.
Hansard documents now suggest that the ‘summer’ deadline has quietly been abandoned, and three different ministers across two departments have declined at various points to give a firm publication date. Alongside this, a cluster of written questions and Health Bill amendments this month has surfaced contradictions in how the department describes its own review.
A commission with just two questions
In the commissioning letter sent to the ACMD Chair on June 2, 2025, then-Minister of State for Policing Dame Diana Johnson asked the working group to answer two questions on CBPMs.
- Whether the 2018 changes to the Misuse of Drugs Regulations had had ‘the desired impact’
- And whether the group could ‘identify any unintended consequences… including any inhibiting effect that the availability of CBPMs through private prescriptions has had on the incentive to conduct clinical trials’.
When the Home Office last commissioned a long-term ACMD review of CBPMs, in February 2019, the letter was substantially more structured. It named three specific deliverables with individual deadlines, an assessment framework by November 2019, a synthetic cannabinoids review by summer 2020, and CBPM rescheduling advice by November 2020.
It carried a technical Annex A giving chemical definitions, while explicitly excluding three areas from scope: ‘the classification of cannabis as a Class B drug… any associated criminal offences… (and) the cultivation of the cannabis plant’.
In contrast, the 2025 commissioning letter which kickstarted the incoming review carries none of these.
In response to a Freedom of Information request filed by Cain Hogg on July 24, 2026, the Home Office’s Public Safety Group stated: “No terms of reference, scoping note, or annex accompanied the commission. We did not find any recorded information specifying matters excluded from the scope of that commission.”
Sarah Jones, Minister of State at the Home Department, confirmed the position in a written answer to Labour MP James Naish (Rushcliffe) on September 9, 2026, telling the Commons that the commission ‘does not mention the cultivation of cannabis under section 6’ of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and that cultivation ‘would not be excluded if relevant to the review’s scope’. The working group is therefore technically free to examine domestic supply and cultivation licensing arrangements, a substantive change from 2019.
To be clear, legislation does not require commissions to include any specific detail or take any specific form. Yet, particularly in comparison to similar commissions on this subject, the lack of structure is striking.
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Has the timetable slipped?
The ACMD’s own Work Programme 2026, published on March 11, 2026, described the CBPM workstream as ‘in progress, expected completion by Summer 2026’.
Its public call for evidence opened on September 17, 2025 and closed four weeks later on October 17, meaning that the working group has been analysing submissions for close to 11 months.
On June 1, 2026, Preet Kaur Gill, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary at DHSC, confirmed to Shadow Health Secretary Stuart Andrew that the ACMD’s report was ‘expected by summer 2026’.
In another written answer published just last week (September 09), DHSC’s current Parliamentary Under-Secretary James Frith responded in near identical wording, but dropped any mention of a publication timeline.
The ACMD Secretariat did not respond to Business of Cannabis’ request for comment on the review’s status, submitted on September 1, 2026, at time of publication.
Three ministers, Sarah Jones at the Home Office, Gill and Frith at DHSC, have therefore been asked, in turn, when the review will report. Only one of them, Gill, has committed to a public date, and that date has now passed.
Jones told Bob Blackman, the Conservative Chair of the Backbench Business Committee, that the ACMD ‘determines its own procedures’ and that the review was ‘a priority’ within the 2025-2028 commission.
Cross-party push for reform
Alongside the written questions to ministers, a coordinated cross-party campaign to push through reform is underway.
Anna Sabine, Liberal Democrat MP for Frome and East Somerset, tabled New Clause 116 to the Health Bill on September 3, 2026, calling on the Secretary of State to ‘publish a review on access to medicinal cannabis for children on the NHS’, and ‘take reasonable steps to support and facilitate clinical trials into the use of medicinal cannabis for children’.
During a Report Stage debate on September 8, Sabine noted that despite medical cannabis reducing seizures in one of her constituents by 95%, because treatment is not readily available on the NHS ‘families are faced with an impossible choice: fund thousands of pounds a month to pay privately, or watch their child suffer.’
“Why are parents being made to make that choice? Colleagues across the House, including Tonia Antoniazzi, have long campaigned on the issue and support new Clause 116, which calls on the Secretary of State to assess the availability of medical cannabis on the NHS for children. I hope the government will support this new clause too.”
Amendments tabled at Report Stage in the Commons are a mechanism for backbench and opposition MPs to press the government to act on a subject during the passage of a bill.
The Health Bill cleared the Commons on September 8, 2026, and has moved to the House of Lords, where peers can table similar wording. NC116 itself will not become law, but this means the issue is now on record.
Sabine’s clause sat on the amendment paper alongside New Clauses 86 and 87 from Labour’s Jeff Smith on compassionate access to Schedule 1 innovative treatments and cross-party support for research involving controlled substances.
Both have a mix of Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat co-sponsors. In parallel, Antoniazzi has been running the Hannah Deacon Campaign in memory of the tireless medical cannabis campaigner, and her Early Day Motion 65292 calling for a funded observational trial for children with drug-resistant epilepsy has attracted 35 signatures since being tabled in February.
A public petition making the same demand closed on September 6, 2026, with 3,109 signatures, short of the 10,000 threshold that would have triggered a formal government response.
Fewer than five patients in England are currently receiving NHS-funded prescriptions for unlicensed CBPMs, DHSC confirmed to Naish in a written answer this month.
