New medical marijuana prescription approved in Sweden

 

File photo of a cannabis plant. Photo: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

 

TT/The Local

 

A further person has been granted a licence to use marijuana for medical purposes in Sweden three months after an historic decision from the country's Medical Products Agency (Läkemedelsverket) to allow the first prescriptions of the drug in the country. 

 

The first two Swedish licences to use parts of the cannabis plants to relieve chronic pain were granted last February, and since then there have been ten further applications. One of those has now been approved, newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (SvD) reports.

The licences allow patients to use cannabis in the form of Dutch medical marijuana strain Bediol.

The applications must be written by a doctor and cannot be submitted by a private individual.

"A prescription for Bediol means that all other medicine and treatments have previously been tried and that they did not give the desired effect," Läkemedelsverket clinical researcher Karl Mikael Kälkner told SvD.

Though generally perceived as a liberal country, Sweden has a strict attitude towards drugs. In July 2015 for example, two men were jailed for a combined five and a half years for growing around 31 kg of cannabis in a disused school building.