Importation of medicinal cannabis (FOI)

How many islanders have been prescribed medical cannabis (plant or plant based products) by licensed clinics and how long does it take for the prescription to be passed by the customs legislation and arrive to the patients?

It is not possible to answer the question regarding the exact number of islanders who have been prescribed medical cannabis, for the following reasons:

• The information which is held is in relation to import licences issued for patients who have their prescription issued in the UK and want to import their medicine into Jersey.  Information is not held for prescriptions written in the UK.
• Patients may have more than one import licence issued.
• Requests for import licences are on a regular basis, and they take time to process – therefore, a prescription may have been written but a licence not yet issued.
• In order to identify specific patients, all the individual import licence records would have to be interrogated. This would take a considerable amount of time and would be well in excess of 12.5 hours allowed for Freedom of Information requests.  

The information that can be provided is as follows:

• There have been no prescriptions written by clinics in Jersey
• The number of import licences issued for cannabis based products for medicinal use  in the last few months are:

There are no specific time frames in relation to the processing of medicinal cannabis import licenses/prescriptions.