Can medical cannabis protect against Covid-19? Claims investigated

A confession: I’ve sampled cannabis — just the once, as a teenager. I didn’t enjoy it (I remember coughing a lot) and I was acutely aware that it was a Class B drug, meaning I could, in theory, have been sentenced to up to five years in jail for possession. But young and impetuous, I still puffed away.

Cannabis remains a Class B drug, but that doesn’t seem to be a major deterrent. A recent survey claimed that five million people in the UK had consumed cannabis in the previous three months. 

Some do it to chill out, but others use it to ease chronic pain, anxiety or for other medical conditions.

The use of cannabis as a medicine is hardly new, but it’s still controversial. You may remember the raging debate in 2018 over the case of Billy Caldwell, a young boy whose mother tried to bring cannabis oil into the UK for him.

Billy, who has epilepsy, suffered up to 300 seizures a day, and despite compelling evidence that cannabis oil can cut these (a large trial in 2017 showed it reduced the frequency of seizures by about a half), Billy’s mother was unable to get it prescribed in the UK.

So she went to…