Cancard: backed by police, designed with doctors, made for patients
CDPRG Team
Over 1 Million UK Adults Eligible For New Medical Cannabis Card
From 1 November this year, over 1 million adults will be eligible to apply for a new exemption card, Cancard, which has been designed by medical cannabis patients to protect them from prosecution. The CDPRG and our unenumerated chairman Crispin Blunt are delighted to stand in full support of this initiative.
The card will help to facilitate a more open engagement with the police and the criminal justice system. Cancard was conceived by Carly Barton, the UK’s most prominent advocate for medicinal cannabis law reform.
Backed by representatives of every rank and file police officer in the country with a working group that includes senior officers from organised crime and the drugs lead for the National Police Chiefs Council, the new scheme is set to highlight both the inequity of access to medicinal cannabis and the near constant fear of 1.4 million adults, who regularly use cannabis for its therapeutic effect. It also highlights the unfair position that frontline officers have been put in when policing possession offences since the law changed in 2018.
Cancard is a holographic photo ID card which has been developed in collaboration with GPs and is verified at the patient's surgery. The card has been created for people who suffer from conditions that private healthcare clinicians have been prescribing for since 1 November 2018. Such treatments are currently unavailable in the NHS and remain beyond the means of all but a few patients.
Those eligible, and in possession of a Cancard, will be able to identify themselves to police as verified medicinal cannabis patients and will have access to an open source legal defence provided by Cancard should they require it. Patients will be able to register interest in the scheme as of Wednesday the 9th September so that they can be one of the first to officially apply on November the 1st 2020.
This groundbreaking initiative is the first such scheme in the UK to have active support from police, MPs, peers and doctors.
Source: Hinterlandco.com.au
How the card application will work:
- Patient calls their GP and gives permission for them to confirm their medical condition with Cancard. - Patient submits an application along with a passport photo and their GPs email address. - The GP is sent a form similar to that which is often requested for private health insurance, in that they are
merely confirming a diagnosis that meets the eligibility criteria for a private cannabis prescription. - The GP form comes back to Cancard signed for review via email. - The Cancard is released to the patient.