Left in the dark: are private cannabis clinics turning their backs on psychiatric patients?

For years, private medical cannabis clinics built their reputations on access and care. They advertised low barriers to entry and a compassionate approach to conditions the NHS often struggles to manage. For many patients, that promise was real, and life-changing.

Recent months tell a more worrying story. Following greater regulatory pressure and a coroner's report about prescribing safety, some clinics appear to have moved into a defensive crouch. Rather than working with patients to deliver safe, individual care, a number seem to be quietly closing the door on people with a mental health history, sometimes the very people who were welcomed a year or two ago.

We want to be clear and fair. Some caution is understandable, and safe prescribing is not optional. But caution should mean better assessment, not blanket exclusion. When a clinic refuses or discharges someone without a proper look at their situation, and without a chance to reply, that is not safety. That is a patient being left in the dark.

A pattern reported across the community

This is not about a single clinic. Patients sharing their experiences on platforms such as Reddit and Facebook describe a wider trend, and while every case is different, the themes are strikingly consistent. These are patients' own accounts, not statements from the clinics. Three concerns come up again and again:

To understand the change, it helps to understand what came before it. Much of the current caution traces back to one deeply sad case, and to the campaign his family began in his memory.

Oliver Robinson was 34. He lived with recurrent depression and a diagnosed dependency on cannabis. What happened to Oliver, and the inquest that followed, led to the first finding of its kind in the UK. We share the timeline below with care and respect for his family.

First, and above all, the loss of Oliver was a tragedy. We hold his family and everyone who loved him in our thoughts, and we admire their determination to spare others the same pain. The failings around his care were real, and they mattered.

It is because we take his case seriously that we have to be honest about where we differ from Oliver's Law. The campaign, following the coroner's finding, places medical cannabis itself in the chain of events that led to his passing. Respectfully, we do not share that conclusion. We do not believe the medicine was the cause.

What we see in Oliver's case is not a dangerous medicine, but a breakdown in the clinical practice around it. A prescription was issued after a single video call, without proper assessment, without contact with his other doctors, and without the monitoring, coordination and aftercare that any patient with a complex history should be able to expect. Oliver was let down by gaps in care, not by the existence of a prescription. Blaming the substance risks learning the wrong lesson entirely.

We are also aware of a suggestion, raised by some patients, that cost may have played a part, and that a need for medicine that worked could have been read as dependency. PatientsCann UK has no direct evidence for this and cannot speak to it, so we note it only to say that questions remain. What we can say with confidence is that affordable, consistent access to effective treatment matters.

That distinction matters, because his case is now being used to justify the opposite of better care. Rather than strengthening assessment, follow-up and aftercare, some clinics are simply refusing or discharging patients and calling it safety. It is not. It repeats the original failure in reverse: patients with a mental health history are again being let down, this time by being shut out.

When clinics rely on automated screening or final, no-appeal decisions, and will not look at clarifying letters from a patient's own NHS doctors, they are not managing risk. They are passing it straight to the patient, who is left without treatment, without a reason, and often without the continuity of care that was keeping them well.

We believe clinical practice must change, but towards more thorough care, not less access to it: careful assessment, honest conversations about risk, joined-up work with a patient's other doctors, and proper aftercare. Many people with a mental health diagnosis are stable, informed and safely treated. They deserve fair, individual assessment and continuity of care. That is the change we are campaigning for.

Fairness matters to us, so we include the clinic's own account. Curaleaf did not reply to our own invitation to comment, but it treated Oliver, and in February 2026 it sent a formal response to the coroner's Prevention of Future Deaths report, a public document we include here so you can weigh it for yourself. We set out its main points below, and you can read the full letter in reference 12. In several places it echoes what we argue here: that the medicine was not a simple cause, and that better joined-up care is the answer.

In its letter, the clinic offered its deepest sympathies to Oliver's family and said its thoughts remained with everyone affected. It noted that the inquest recorded a conclusion of death by misadventure, and that the coroner found it more likely than not that Oliver did not intend the consequences of his actions, with his distress driven by many things at once, including conflict with housing and NHS services, debt, and a dependence on cannabis from both illicit and prescribed sources.

On how the prescription was decided

The clinic respectfully disagreed with the picture of a single junior view after one video call. It said the prescribing psychiatrist was a fully qualified consultant on the GMC Specialist Register, and that no one clinician at the clinic can start a cannabis prescription alone. Oliver's case, it said, was reviewed and approved by a formal multidisciplinary team of consultants and a specialist pharmacist on 5 May 2022.

On whether other treatments had been tried

The clinic also disputed the finding that options had not been exhausted. It listed a long history of licensed medicines Oliver had trialled across every major class of antidepressant, alongside extensive talking therapies, an inpatient admission, more than 60 sessions of schema therapy, and EMDR. It said the licensed options that remained carried real risks of their own, and that Oliver did not wish to take them.

On how he responded to treatment

On outcomes, the clinic pointed to Oliver's own recorded scores. It said his PHQ-9 depression score, a standard measure, fell from 23, in the severe range, down to 8, in the mild range, during treatment, which it described as a clinically significant improvement.

On records and communication

The clinic said the GP record it relied on was less than a year old and held the information it needed, and that a clinician also took a full history from Oliver directly. On contact with his other psychiatrists, it accepted that, with hindsight, it could have been more proactive, but it noted that communication is a two-way process, that Oliver had not passed on the contact details it asked for, and that the Priory and his NHS psychiatrist knew of the prescription yet did not raise concerns with the clinic at the time.

Curaleaf also said it had already investigated and changed its practice before the inquest. It now has access to the NHS national care records system, requires contact with a patient's community mental health team before prescribing where one is involved, and has introduced a dedicated pathway for higher-risk patients.

It is easy to forget why people come to a private clinic in the first place. Most have already tried everything else. They have lived for years with chronic pain, treatment-resistant conditions, or mental health difficulties that the NHS, for all its strengths, could not fully manage. For many, medical cannabis was the first thing in a long time that gave them real relief and a sense of stability.

That is the unmet need at the heart of this story. These are not people chasing something they do not need. They are people who were already underserved, who finally found something that worked, and who are now being turned away from it. Their need has not gone anywhere. It has simply stopped being met.

The current shift does not close that gap. It widens it, sharply. Every refusal, every sudden discharge, every application blocked over a misread note adds another person to a growing list of patients left without care. Some will cope. Others will lose the stability they worked so hard to find, be pushed back onto treatments that never helped them, or drift back towards the unregulated sources they had worked to leave behind. None of that makes anyone safer.

There is another side to this that often goes unspoken. For almost everyone in the UK, medical cannabis is a private service. NHS prescriptions remain very rare, so patients pay for their assessments, their appointments and their medicine out of their own pocket, month after month.

Many of the people affected are out of work because of a chronic illness, and rely on benefits and Personal Independence Payment (PIP) to manage. With the cost of living high and prescription costs climbing, some are left with an impossible choice: pay for their medicine, or pay their bills. That is a decision no one should have to make.

When a clinic suddenly refuses or discharges someone, it does not only take away their care. It can also take away a treatment they have already stretched a tight budget to afford, and push them to start over elsewhere, at further cost, if they can find another clinic at all.

There is also a bigger picture that the current caution overlooks. In the United States, where access is more established, research has linked medical cannabis to people being better able to stay in work. A 2026 study in the Journal of Workplace Behavioral Health, drawing on data covering more than 20 million workers, found that medical cannabis laws were associated with around a 6.9 per cent fall in health-related sickness absence, with the largest improvements among people in physically demanding jobs.

In other words, when patients can reach the treatment that helps them, many become more able to work, not less. Cutting stable patients off does not only harm them as individuals. It works against the healthier, more independent lives that everyone, the health system included, says they want.

It would be unfair to treat this as a purely clinical question, or to judge private clinics only against the NHS. These are businesses. Unlike the NHS, they are not funded by taxes. Every assessment, every hour of a consultant's time, and every bit of aftercare has to be paid for out of what patients themselves can afford.

That reality sits underneath much of what patients are seeing. A complex mental health case is exactly the kind that needs the most costly resource a clinic has: senior specialist time. Doing it properly means a careful assessment, reading and checking records, contacting a patient's NHS team, and following up over months. All of that costs money, and it carries more risk if something later goes wrong.

Set against that, a quick refusal is cheap and, for the clinic, low risk. An automated screen that turns away anyone with a mental health flag protects the business from both cost and liability in a single step. We are not excusing it, but we have to be honest that some of these decisions are shaped as much by commercial caution as by clinical judgement.

Thorough care often costs more

There is a flip side, and it matters. Not every clinic takes the quick route. Some specialist services do take on the more complex cases and give them the time they genuinely need. For patients who can reach them, that is good news.

But a more thorough, consultant-led assessment usually comes at a higher price. That leaves a real unfairness at the heart of this: the patients with the most complex histories, who most need a careful assessment, are often the same people on the tightest budgets, for whom the more expensive specialist clinics are hardest to afford. No one should have to weigh their own health against what they can afford, and a fair system should not price the most thorough care out of reach of the very people who need it most.

The reasons behind a rejection often only come to light when a patient asks to see their records. One person who contacted PatientsCann UK had been safely prescribed medical cannabis for five years. When they applied to Medicann, they were refused after their initial consultation, with no notice or warning.

Only after filing a Subject Access Request did they learn why. Their file had been flagged internally as "high risk." The flag came from an incident in which they had been detained under mental health powers, something a psychiatrist, a GP and an occupational health doctor had each separately confirmed did not reflect their actual health or level of risk.

During the initial consultation, the patient had offered to supply these supporting specialist letters. Afterwards, Medicann issued a blanket rejection anyway, without reviewing the evidence and without a further conversation. When a review was requested, the reply was a standard statement:

Clinics do have the legal right to decide whether to prescribe an unlicensed medicine. That part is true. But treating a decision as "final" while refusing to look at clarifying evidence from a patient's own NHS psychiatrist and GP raises a serious question about the basic duty of care. A flag based on a misunderstood event, left uncorrected, can quietly follow a patient from clinic to clinic.

If you have been refused, discharged or flagged, it can feel final and personal. It is usually neither. Here is a calm, practical order of things to try. Go at your own pace, and reach out for support if you need it.

A SAR is one of the most useful tools you have. It lets you see what a clinic holds about you, including the reason behind a decision. It is free, it is your legal right under UK data protection law, and you do not need a solicitor. Open each step below.