The 2024 Social Security budget adopted a year ago included a provision allowing the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) to authorize the sale in France of cannabis-based medicines, thus paving the way for a generalization of the use of these products.
This green light was based in particular on the favorable results of an experiment since 2021, which today still concerns more than 1,800 patients using these drugs, and which must end on December 31.
But the executive has not taken the necessary regulatory texts to apply this provision, and patients and doctors “risk finding themselves in an impasse again” in 2025, explained Ludovic Rachou, president of the Union of industrial companies for the valorization of hemp extracts (Uivec).
According to him, the patients included in the experiment could no longer have access to the products “from January or February, when hospital pharmacies” will have reached the end of their stocks, he explained.
As for access to new patients, it will continue to be impossible, as has already been the case since the closure of the experiment on March 31.
Unrelieved pain
Faced with this situation, Uivec and doctors and patient associations are asking the government to use the 2025 Social Security draft budget to extend at the last minute the experiment underway since 2021. “Behind these deadlines, there are thousands of betrayed patients who see their hope of benefiting from new treatments slip away. It is the patients, already suffering, who are forced to suffer the consequences,” deplore around fifteen doctors and around ten patient associations, in a letter to the Minister of Health sent by the Uivec.
“How can we explain that in France, a Social Security country, we are incapable of following the example of the 22 countries of the European Union which have already authorized medical cannabis? », they ask.
Therapeutic cannabis is used to improve the quality of life of patients who suffer from pain not relieved by other medications. It can be used in particular in cases of cancer, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy or rare diseases. The therapeutic benefit of cannabis is subject to debate, and both the Academy of Medicine and the Academy of Pharmacy have criticized its experimentation.
