There was no press conference, no ministerial statement, no front-page splash.
But buried in the Care Quality Commission’s latest annual controlled-drugs report, published on 9 July, is one of the most remarkable growth stories in British healthcare: medical cannabis prescribing has more than doubled — again.
According to The Safer Management of Controlled Drugs: Annual Update 2025, private prescribing of unlicensed cannabis-based products for medicinal use (CBPMs) rose from 356,335 items in 2023/24 to 833,525 items in the year to 31 March 2025 — a 134% increase, or roughly 2.3 times the previous year’s total, as industry analysis by the Cannabis Industry Council puts it.
To appreciate what that means, look at the trajectory, not just the headline figure.
Doubling, year after year
When the CQC published its 2023 update, it noted that unlicensed CBPM prescribing was increasing by at least 100% annually — a pattern the Pharmaceutical Journal reported as prescriptions more than doubling between 2021/22 and 2022/23. The 2024 report showed the same again: 150,527 items in 2022/23 became 346,600 in 2023/24, a 130% jump. Now the 2025 update confirms a third consecutive year of doubling.
Put those figures together and the picture is striking. In the space of just two financial years, annual CBPM prescribing has grown more than fivefold. Since the law changed on 1 November 2018 — when cannabis-based medicines were rescheduled to allow prescribing by specialist doctors — the sector has gone from a standing start to what Chambers’ 2026 UK practice guide estimates is a market serving somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 patients.
Who’s actually writing the prescriptions?
One of the most telling details in the CQC’s data is who is doing the prescribing. The Cannabis Industry Council’s analysis of the 2025 report found that 63% of CBPM prescriptions were issued by pharmacists, with 39 providers now identified as prescribing these medicines across the UK.
That tallies with recent freedom-of-information data showing that pharmacist independent prescribers have accounted for 955,471 prescription items — 61.9% of the roughly 1.54 million CBPM items issued between January 2019 and May 2025. Medical cannabis in Britain is no longer the preserve of a handful of specialist consultants. It has become embedded in multidisciplinary clinical teams, with pharmacists doing much of the heavy lifting — exactly the kind of normalisation that tends to happen when a treatment moves from the fringe towards the mainstream.
The elephant in the room: the NHS
All of this growth is happening almost entirely in the private sector. NHS prescribing of unlicensed CBPMs remains so rare that, in an earlier report, the CQC said the numbers were too small to publish without risking patient confidentiality. Nearly eight years after legalisation, patients who can pay are accessing these medicines in ever-greater numbers through regulated private clinics, while those who cannot are left waiting.
That gap is one reason the industry is pressing for the long-awaited Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs review of medical cannabis, expected this summer but still unpublished at the time of writing.
Growth with guard rails
The CQC’s report is not a cheerleading document, and it shouldn’t be read as one. The regulator continues to flag genuine concerns: variable prescribing practices, gaps in clinical governance, and poor communication between private clinics, pharmacies and patients’ own GPs — issues also highlighted in previous annual updates.
Its recommendations call for stronger oversight, better data sharing and tighter governance to prevent diversion, fraud and medication errors.
The sector, to its credit, appears to be responding rather than resisting. The Medical Cannabis Clinicians Society has strengthened its good-practice guidance for prescribers — guidance the CQC itself describes as aligning with its expectations — while clinics such as Releaf have publicly committed to the updated best-practice framework.
The quiet mainstreaming of a once-taboo medicine
Strip away the caveats and the core story is hard to miss. A Schedule 2 controlled drug that was, until late 2018, effectively unprescribable in the UK is now being dispensed more than 800,000 times a year through regulated clinics, prescribed mostly by pharmacists, overseen by the national care regulator, and growing at a rate — doubling annually — that few areas of medicine can match.
Nobody in Westminster is shouting about it. But year by year, prescription by prescription, medical cannabis is becoming an ordinary part of British healthcare. The CQC’s own figures say so.
Sources
- CQC — The Safer Management of Controlled Drugs: Annual Update 2025
- Cannabis Industry Council — CQC annual report highlights continued growth in UK medical cannabis prescribing
- Cannabis Industry Council — 130% increase in CBPM items dispensed (2024 report analysis)
- Cannabis Industry Council — FOI data highlights pharmacists’ role in CBPM prescribing
- Cannabis Industry Council — UK medical cannabis industry calls for long-awaited ACMD review
- CQC — Controlled drugs annual update report 2023
- CQC — Cannabis-based medicinal products: what CQC expects from providers
- The Pharmaceutical Journal — Prescriptions for cannabis-based medicines double in a year, CQC report says
- Chambers Global Practice Guides — Medical Cannabis & Psychedelic Medicines 2026: UK Trends and Developments
- Medical Cannabis Clinicians Society — CQC medical cannabis guidance: what prescribers and providers need to know
- Releaf — New best practice guidelines for prescribing UK medical cannabis released
