2026 Police Guidance on Medicinal Cannabis in the UK: Progress, Limits, and What Comes Next
- Hannah Barnett
- 18 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Written by Hannah Barnett For the first time since cannabis-based products for medicinal use were legalised in 2018, police officers across England and Wales now have a shared set of principles to guide interactions with patients who are lawfully prescribed these treatments.
The first official national guidance on medicinal cannabis for police officers was made public last week and is now in effect across all 43 police forces in England and Wales. Its publication marks a quiet but consequential shift in how the law is expected to be applied in everyday encounters.
The guidance seeks to confront long-standing confusion within policing about how medicinal cannabis fits into existing drug laws and procedures. In the absence of clear national direction, enforcement has often been left to individual officer discretion. As a result, patients have frequently been required to justify their treatment in public, sometimes under threat of enforcement.
The new guidance introduces a clearer and more consistent approach. Officers are instructed to begin from the assumption of lawful medical use, and escalate only where there is reasonable doubt. For patients and police alike, this represents a long-awaited attempt to reduce uncertainty, inconsistency, and avoidable harm.
Reframing the police–patient encounter
One of the most significant contributions of the guidance is conceptual rather than procedural. It states that people in lawful possession of medicinal cannabis are patients “who are very likely to be suffering from chronic pain and/or other serious ailments” and that they should be treated as such unless there are justifiable grounds to believe otherwise.
This reframing narrows the circumstances under which further questioning is justified and recognises the vulnerability of many people prescribed these medications. It also challenges the engrained social tendency to treat people who use medical cannabis as drug users rather than patients.
Clarifying what has been persistently misunderstood
The guidance also addresses common areas of legal uncertainty, including the legality of unlicensed medicines, permitted methods of use, and how medicinal cannabis fits within existing drug and driving laws.
These points are not new interpretations of the law, but instead consolidate historically fragmented pieces of knowledge into a nationally endorsed reference point.
The limits of guidance alone
The document acknowledges its own limitations. It notes that it cannot resolve structural issues embedded in legislation, nor can it eliminate the role of discretion in real-world situations. What’s left is the reality that policy documents do not automatically produce cultural change. Training, reinforcement, and systemic reflection are necessary for long-term behaviour shifts across forces.
Why this moment matters beyond policing
Legal change can remove formal barriers, but it does not automatically dismantle stigma or reshape professional standards. More than eight years after medical cannabis was legalised in the UK, police officers finally have a national framework for aligning practice with the reality of lawful medical use.
This marks an important reorientation between health policy and enforcement by recognising patients as patients, rather than drug users. Whether this shift holds will be revealed not by the guidance itself, but by how it is lived and experienced by patients.
In 2024, Drug Science published a legal guide designed to assist medical cannabis patients in navigating the complex regulatory framework surrounding prescription and use. While the guide represented an important step in improving legal awareness within this area, many of the issues it identified remain unresolved. Consequently, as legislation and clinical practice continue to evolve, the guide is becoming increasingly outdated so please take the information included in this guide with a hint of skepticism and for any actual legal issues, consult a solicitor.
