Patients fear shortage of medicinal cannabis when rules change

Patients who rely on medicinal cannabis are worried about supplies running out when the government ends its contract with the only Dutch licensed grower next year.

The health ministry is not renewing the contract between the Bureau for Medicinal Cannabis (BMC) and Bedrocan from 2027 as part of a plan to liberalise the supply chain by letting suppliers sell directly to pharmacies.

But the rule changes have been delayed, meaning that Bedrocan, based in Emmeloord, will be unable to sell its products at all from next year.

The government says it will import medicinal cannabis from abroad to ensure patients are not denied treatment. The BMC has ordered in extra stocks for the start of next year, but these medicines will go out of date in mid-2027.

Around 7,000 people in the Netherlands are prescribed cannabis for conditions such as MS and epilepsy, or as a form of palliative care.

The MS Vereniging, which represents people with multiple sclerosis, warned that using a different variant of the medicine would be less effective for some patients.

Specific variety

In a letter to health minister Sophie Hermans, the MS association said some patients who had been prescribed cannabis long-term were dependent on a “specific variety” of the drug and switching to an alternative version would affect the quality of their treatment.

The ministry disputed this in its reply, saying there was “no scientific evidence that different varieties have different therapeutic effects”.

But Renger Witkamp, professor of pharmacology at Wageningen University, said different varieties of cannabis were known to work differently. “Cannabis is different from synthetic medicines,” he told the Volkskrant. “The plant contains dozens of chemicals that collectively determine the effect.

“The relationship between those chemicals is determined by the plant variety, but also by the conditions in which it is grown, such as light, soil and fertiliser.”