Why I became a cannabis medicine doctor

When I joined Curaleaf in 2023 as their first GP clinician, there was no roadmap. Cannabis medicine in the UK was only a few years into legal prescribing, the regulatory framework was still being shaped, and the clinical community ranged from cautiously curious to actively hostile.

But I had not arrived without context. Long before medical school, I had trained in herbal medicine, a rigorous, evidence-based programme that gave me a deep respect for plant alkaloids, flavonoids, and the complexity of what whole-plant preparations can do. That training taught me something that conventional pharmacology often sidesteps: that health is not simply the absence of symptoms. It is bound up with sleep, appetite, mood, pain, and, for many patients, something harder to name.

The patients who brought me here

In general practice, I had spent years watching patients cycle through the same narrow set of options. Opiates, escalating in dose. Benzodiazepines, prescribed short-term and continued for years. Patients who had come to medicine asking for help and had left with a different set of problems. Many of them had already found cannabis on their own and were asking me about it quietly, half-expecting to be judged.

What I understood from my herbal medicine background was that cannabis is not simply an antidepressant, or a painkiller, or an anxiolytic, though it can be all of those things. It acts on multiple systems at once. It helps with sleep. It stimulates appetite. It reduces pain. It eases anxiety and low mood. And for some patients, particularly the elderly Rastafarian patients I encountered early in my career, it carried a dimension of spiritual and personal meaning that sat entirely outside the usual clinical framework, and mattered to them enormously.

That breadth of effect, and that connection to the whole person, is what orthodox medicine had failed to offer them. It is why I am here.