DGS prevents French patients from accessing medical cannabis

The possibility of prescribing medical cannabis in France in 2020 is receding. If last week we highlighted strong calendar imperatives for a prescription announced for September 2020, the regulatory blockage is another.

And today, the experimentation of therapeutic cannabis in France seems to be prevented from moving forward by the Direction Générale de la Santé, more specifically by the services of Dr. Zinna Bessa, Deputy Director of Population Health and Chronic Disease Prevention at the DGS, as a source close to the matter tells us.

Nicolas Authier, Chairman of the ANSM's Temporary Scientific Committee (CST) on «Implementation of medical cannabis trials in France», confirms the need for strong administrative decisions.

«Following the Véran amendment to the latest Social Security Financing Bill, a decree must be published to authorize this experiment. Without this, the current work of the CST, which is progressing without too much delay thanks to numerous remote meetings, notably to set up training, the registry and the patient inclusion method, will remain a dead letter.»

The decree is also needed to draw up specifications for the products to be supplied to patients. Since 2013, the medical use of cannabis and its derivatives has been limited to pharmaceutical specialties with AMM or ATU, such as’Epidyolex, Sativex or Marinol. Any other cannabis-based product containing more than 0.2% THC is currently banned, even for medical purposes.

Finally, the question of funding for this experiment has not yet been addressed. Assuming that medical cannabis suppliers are still willing to offer their products free of charge, despite having accused serious setbacks since the end of 2019 and are no longer in the same financial health, The cost of setting up a therapeutic cannabis trial is linked to the training of professionals, the creation of a patient registry and the distribution of cannabis... A cost that will have to be borne by France. Ironically, the only cannabis-based product with marketing authorization is Sativex, has never reached the shelves of pharmacies, officially for a question of... price and reimbursement.

For Nicolas Authier, «it is therefore unlikely that the first prescriptions of medical cannabis will take place in September 2020, especially as a sufficient number of doctors will have to be trained before then. The good news is that this experiment has not been called into question or officially postponed, and we can now hope that the inclusion of the first patients can begin under good conditions in the first quarter of 2021.»