The clock is ticking for the thousand patients with serious pathologies involved in experimenting with therapeutic cannabis and for the doctors who support them. Will they find themselves in an impasse? Alerts have become increasingly loud among defenders of this medical device launched in March 2021, under the supervision of the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products (ANSM), as the deadline approaches. : on December 31, 2024, the experiment is supposed to end.
In October 2023, Aurélien Rousseau, then Minister of Health, made a commitment to grant a “status for this” medical cannabis, used for its pain-relieving properties for patients in “therapeutic impasse”, as doctors say. This status, which would allow affected patients to continue to be prescribed the substance, was included in the Social Security financing law in December 2023.
But a year later, vagueness once again dominates the future, while the executive carries the “war on drugs” as its standard. “The regulatory texts are missing to be able to move to this ad hoc status, after a transitional phase in recent months where, politically, nothing happened”reports psychiatrist and pharmacologist Nicolas Authier, president of the ANSM scientific committee on therapeutic cannabis. Result : “Either the experiment stops abruptly and our patients will no longer have access to these products, since pharmacists will no longer be able to dispense them from 1is January. Either we further extend the experimental status, but this urgently requires a decision from the Ministry of Health. »
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