Companies have rushed to supply the drug as a wellness treatment, but patients with serious illnesses aren’t able to get NHS prescriptions In 2022, a prodigiously talented young artist named Louis Petit was preparing to return to the UK, having been effectively exiled in the Netherlands as a teenager so he could access the medical cannabis he needed to control his epilepsy. Six years earlier, Louis, then 12, had been diagnosed with a rare form of the neurological disease when medical cannabis was still illegal in the UK. But in Rotterdam, where it was legal, doctors helped him discover that a medical cannabis oil called Bedrolite, in combination with the right mix of anti-epileptic treatment, could slow and eventually stop his seizures. This was something his neurologists in the UK had previously considered impossible. Dr Kojo Koram is professor of law and political economy at Loughborou