Our Campaign
Oliver's death was preventable. We're calling for urgent regulatory reform to ensure it never happens again.
We’re campaigning for reform of medical cannabis prescribing to psychiatric patients.
We have 3 simple asks:
No cannabis prescriptions for people with serious & complex mental illness.
If you have psychosis, bipolar disorder, or are actively suicidal, a private clinic should not be able to prescribe you high-potency cannabis after a single video call.
One register. Every prescription. No exceptions.
A central NHS registry recording every cannabis prescription issued in the UK — who prescribed it, to whom, and what happened next.
Treat cannabis clinics like any other medical provider.
Routine inspections, published prescribing data, and automatic referral to the GMC when volumes make safe care impossible.
How might this look in detail:
Patients with serious & complex mental health problems, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, psychosis, or active suicidal ideation - should not be prescribed cannabis. This should be set out as a regulatory requirement, not left to individual clinical judgment.
1. Enforce Clear Contraindications
Before prescribing medical cannabis to any patient with mental health history, private clinics should be required to contact the patient's treating NHS psychiatrist or mental health team. Prescribing decisions should not be made in isolation.
2. Require Psychiatric Consultation
3. Ban Video-Only Consultations for Complex Cases
Patients with serious or complex medical histories should receive a face-to-face assessment before any prescription. Video-only appointments are not sufficient for complex cases.
4. Strengthen Oversight and Reporting
A centralised mandatory adverse-event reporting system for all CBPM prescriptions, with findings reported to Parliament annually.
A volume-based automatic referral threshold — any prescriber whose monthly prescription volumes make safe clinical assessment mathematically impossible should trigger mandatory GMC fitness-to-practise review, with the specific threshold determined by the GMC in consultation with clinical experts.
5. Safer Prescribing
Mandatory reporting of all CBPM prescriptions to a central registry, with real-time monitoring by NHSBSA and automatic publication of anonymised volume data quarterly — so that the regulatory blind spot revealed by The Times can never recur.
6. Ongoing Monitoring
Routine independent audits of cannabis clinics and transparent prescribing data, publicly reported.
7. Routine Audits
Professional consequences for doctors who prescribe outside their competence, fail to take adequate clinical histories, or ignore documented contraindications — including serious mental illness, active suicidality, or a history of psychosis.
8. Enforce Professional Standards
The moment is now
The government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) is currently reviewing the medical cannabis regulations introduced in 2018. This is the moment to act.
Oliver's story - and the coroner's Prevention of Future Deaths report - provides clear evidence that the current system is failing vulnerable patients.
We are calling on the ACMD and the government to implement these reforms now, to prevent future harm.