The Island Lacks Potency

My own chronic pain is no small part of why you will so often find me here at this sort of hour, so it is with nothing but sympathy that I bring you the stories told by Samuel Lovett:

For years Tanya Mitchell lived with agonising pain in her hips that left her struggling to walk and reliant on a heavy daily dose of ibuprofen. Today, however, the 84-year-old starts every morning with yoga and moves so quickly while walking through the fields of western Jersey, where she lives, that her husband struggles to keep up.

Her secret, she says, sits in a small glass dropper bottle on her bedside table: a half-millilitre syringe of prescribed medicinal cannabis oil, placed under her tongue every night before she goes to sleep. “I don’t have pain anymore,” said Mitchell, who has been taking the drug since January 2025. “I swear by it. It’s been life-changing.”

Mitchell is one of at least 4,300 residents on Jersey — equivalent to 4 per cent of its 104,500 population — who are prescribed medicinal cannabis. It is a figure that makes this tiny, affluent British crown dependency among the world’s most heavily prescribed populations for the drug. By comparison, just 0.1 per cent of the population in the UK have legal prescriptions.

In a decade, Jersey has moved from near-total prohibition to one of the most liberal cannabis regimes in the British Isles. Last year it came within one vote of decriminalising the drug. Today there are 20 prescribing clinicians and five private “cannabis clinics” across the island.

Demand for the drug, often used to treat insomnia, arthritis and chronic pain, is growing. Last year, the number of products prescribed by Jersey’s private “cannabis clinics” — which have been legally dispensing the drug since 2019 — increased by 35 per cent, from 53,477 in 2024 to 72,065 in 2025, according to official data. Prescriptions include gummies, vapes, oils, inhalers, patches and dried cannabis, and typically cost between £70 and £400 a month.

Patients in Jersey praise the medicinal benefits of cannabis, but the industry is now under increasing scrutiny. There has been a “significant increase” in people being taken to hospital for psychosis and mental illness after taking prescribed cannabis, according to Andy Weir, Jersey’s mental health lead. Some patients are presenting to the island’s psychiatric services “with a deterioration in their mood associated with prescribed cannabis use”, he added. Research has consistently found that heavy cannabis use is linked to higher psychosis risk, driven by exposure to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), its main psychoactive component.

Within the past six months, 31 per cent of patients admitted to Jersey’s mental health unit (32 of 104) reported using cannabis, legally and illegally, Weir said. Last year the drug was a “contributing factor” in 22 per cent of admissions, the government said. Medicinal cannabis has also been privately prescribed in England since 2018, but the government has asked its drugs advisers to review the practice after a rise in psychosis cases.

An inquest is underway into the suspected suicide of an unnamed Jersey resident “where prescribed cannabis use [was] a concern”, according to Weir. A separate inquiry, which concluded in 2024, found that prescribed medicinal cannabis had “more likely than not” adversely affected the mental health of Rebecca Vibert, 46, who took her own life the year before. The police, meanwhile, say that some patients are “clinic-hopping” and purchasing multiple high-strength prescriptions, which they sell at a profit on the black market.

The island’s government is seeking to tighten regulations. Because each private clinic operates independently without standardised oversight, the thresholds for prescription vary and some clinics offer little to no long-term supervision once a prescription is issued. Under proposed controls that could be rolled out early next year, clinics will be required to consult in-person with patients every 90 days, review medical records before issuing a prescription and report adverse drug reactions, among other measures.

Tom Binet, Jersey’s health minister, hopes that these new rules will reverse the rising cases of psychosis. “Our medicines regulations aren’t where they should be,” he said. “We’re looking at everything to try and bring everything up to date.” The Sunday Times also discovered high street shops in St Helier, the island’s largest town, exploiting a legal loophole in Jersey’s cannabis rules to sell high strength recreational THC edibles, such as gummies, chocolates and baked goods and there are reports of minors attempting to buy them.

In the UK over-the-counter cannabis products can contain no more than 1mg of THC. In Jersey, however, edibles can contain THC up to 3 per cent of their cannabidiol (CBD) content, measured by weight. CBD is another compound found in cannabis but it does not generate a high.

This means that the more CBD in a product, the more THC it can legally contain. Manufacturers and retailers have exploited this by packing products with hundreds of milligrams of CBD, allowing them to increase the THC levels. The Sunday Times found examples of baked goods sold in St Helier that were 46 times stronger than the legal limit in the UK. Local clinicians said that these concentrations equal or exceed daily medical prescription doses.

The Jersey government said it was aware of children trying to buy these baked goods and was “actively looking” at changing the 3 per cent rule. “This has come about fairly recently,” said Binet. “[But] the minute this became known to us we put the wheels in motion to get it sorted as quick as we can. It is a concern.”

The relaxation of laws in Jersey has been partly driven by the government’s desire for its farmers to grow cannabis and “diversify [the] rural economy”. A 2022 report from the States Assembly, Jersey’s parliament, said that the government wanted to establish the island as a “world leader” in the medicinal cannabis industry, adding: “Cannabis cultivation presents a significant opportunity to generate additional fiscal receipts … and to increase productivity within the agricultural sector.”

Businesses are now permitted to grow and export cannabis in an agricultural capacity. Some 167 licences to export cannabis off the island were approved in 2025, compared with 87 in 2024 and 26 in 2023. But they have not yet been licensed to package and sell the plant as a drug within Jersey itself.

Max Jablonski, the general manager of Caprica, where futuristic operations are housed inside an old potato glasshouse in the middle of the island, said his company produces around 70kg of cannabis flower a month. This is exported exclusively to the UK, where it is processed and sold on. “We just want to create the best possible quality product for patients who need it,” he said.

The island’s embrace of cannabis has been welcomed by patients such as James Bedding, a quadriplegic who broke his neck when he was 15 years old after falling off St Helier’s Albert Pier. Now 44, he credits the drug with saving his life — after years of struggling with severe muscle spasms. He starts inhaling cannabis via a vape around 7.30am to relax his body and continues taking cannabis throughout the day to keep his spasms at bay. In total, he is prescribed 5g daily and uses strains of cannabis that contain between 21 per cent and 29 per cent THC. “Taking away the fear of breaking the law and getting a clean, consistent supply makes a huge difference,” he said.

But the rapid growth and limited oversight of Jersey’s private cannabis sector has come at a cost, critics argue. Due to the absence of a centralised database, which is set to be addressed by the government reforms, there is currently no way of tracking how many prescriptions a patient has. Dr Kirstie Ross, an emergency medicine doctor at Jersey General Hospital and the co-owner of Carpathia Clinic, which prescribes cannabis, said: “They can come to us and go to another clinic; we never know. It’s a shitshow.”

The island lacks potency and volume caps, meaning some clinics prescribe large amounts of high-strength cannabis to patients who don’t need it. A government audit from 2023 found that multiple patients had been given standalone prescriptions which contained more than a typical months’ supply of cannabis. Some clinics routinely issue allowances of up to 90 to 100 grams of cannabis flower per month, Ross said. A typical joint contains 0.5g of cannabis, the US Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates.

Sir Robin Murray, a professor of psychiatric research and member of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, described Jersey’s approach to medicinal cannabis as “astonishing” and argued the primary purpose of the island’s clinics were “not really to investigate what’s wrong with you, but to dish out cannabis” for commercial profit. He added that the “cavalier” prescribing of cannabis was risking harm and endangering lives.

Police, too, are grappling with the changing landscape of drug use on the island. Chief Inspector Mark Haffey said the practice of “splitting” — when patients sell part of their prescribed cannabis — was a “real concern”. This has made it especially difficult for officers to distinguish between cannabis that is legal and illegal. “Officers now have to make more nuanced decisions, because some people are lawfully prescribed cannabis while others may be using that framework to disguise unlawful possession or supply,” said Haffey. “Medicinal cannabis has changed the environment we are policing.”

There is no such thing as “medicinal cannabis”. When we need aspirin, then we do not simply ingest bark. But there cannot be a “free” market in general, yet not in drugs, or prostitution, or pornography, or unrestricted alcohol, or unrestricted gambling. That is an important part of why there must not be a “free” market in general, which is a political choice, not a law of nature. Enacting and enforcing laws against drugs, prostitution and pornography, and regulating alcohol, tobacco and gambling, are clear examples of State intervention in, and regulation of, the economy. Radical change would be impossible if the workers, the youth and the poor were in a state of stupefaction, and that baleful situation, which has been contrived in the past, is being contrived again today.

We need a single category of illegal drug, including cannabis, with a crackdown on possession, including a mandatory sentence of two years for a first offence, three years for a second offence, four years for a third offence, and so on. I no longer believe in prison sentences that included the possibility of release in less than 12 months; in that case, then your crime was not bad enough to warrant imprisonment, which the possession of drugs is. We need to restore the specific criminal offence of allowing one’s premises to be used for illegal drug purposes. We need Peter Hitchens’s The War We Never Fought to be taught in schools.

And not only on this issue, we need the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice to exercise his prerogative not to recommend Royal Assent to legislation originating in the Crown Dependencies, which would be free to become independent if they did not like that, as would any Crown Dependency or British Overseas Territory that did not like the legislation of the sovereign Parliament of the United Kingdom to close all tax havens under its jurisdiction.