The families of severely epileptic children have held a protest criticising the NHS for failing to prescribe medical cannabis.
The law changed in 2018, allowing doctors to legally prescribe cannabis for some serious conditions.
Although private doctors are issuing prescriptions costing up to £3,500 a month, families say they were promised the drug would be available on the NHS.
The government said it was working hard “to get these drugs available”.
More than a year ago, Canada made recreational cannabis legal. So why are people still buying it on the black market?
When Canada legalised marijuana just over a year ago, it seemed like anyone who was anyone wanted to break into the market.
The media nicknamed the frenzy Canada’s “green rush”, as investors like Snoop Dogg and the former head of Toronto’s police force clamoured to get a slice of the multi-billion-dollar-pie.
But like the gold rush of the 1850s, the lustre would soon fade, leaving prospectors in the dust.
Cannabis cafes in the Netherlands are to be supplied legally with drugs from regulated producers as part of a trial aimed at tackling the black market.
Under Dutch law, cannabis can be sold over the counter in licensed coffee shops, but it is currently illegal to produce and supply the drug.
The country’s loose policy on cannabis has seen criminal enterprises flourish.
From 2021, cafes in 10 cities will get a legal supply of “quality” cannabis as part of a four-year experiment.
Being a former police officer, Lou Haslam knew his family’s story about breaking Australian law to get medicinal cannabis for his son was powerful. It helped lead to a change in the law but, as Gary Nunn reports from Sydney, the family remains unhappy with the result.
Working undercover for the police drugs squad, Mr Haslam, now 66, arrested “a tonnage” of people for cannabis-related crimes in New South Wales (NSW) between 1972 and 2006.
“We were mainly after growers and suppliers,” he says.
Little did he know he’d later possess cannabis himself – and even purchase a farm to grow it. He began supplying cannabis to his own son, Dan Haslam, after he was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2010.
A mother who took her severely ill child to the Netherlands for cannabis oil treatment says she is now trapped living abroad.
Julie Galloway left Scotland with seven-year-old Alexa, who has epilepsy and a rare neurological condition, almost a year ago to live with relatives in Rotterdam.
She says she is still living out of a suitcase and her savings are almost gone – but she fears that returning home without the medication would put her daughter’s life in danger.
Julie, from Cumbernauld in North Lanarkshire, said: “I feel like a refugee forced to live abroad to save my child.
Anthony Clarry has had to get used to breaking the law. Once a month he smuggles two cannabis-based medicines into the UK for his five-year-old daughter Indie-Rose, who has a rare form of severe epilepsy.
Speaking minutes after clearing customs at Stansted Airport, he told the BBC: “Every time I come back from the Netherlands I am really anxious that they might stop me and then I risk a criminal record, and also having Indie’s medicine taken away which would potentially put her life at risk.”
Indie-Rose’s mother, Tannine Montgomery, has also made the trip. She said: “We should not have to spend £1,500 a month on these medicines, but be able to pick it up from a local pharmacy.”
