Can you get medical cannabis for chronic pain in the UK?

Chronic non-cancer pain — long-term back pain, neck pain, widespread musculoskeletal pain — is the single most common reason people are prescribed medical cannabis privately in the UK. It is also the condition where NICE has looked at the evidence and recommended against it. Holding both facts together is the honest starting point.

Is chronic pain treated with medical cannabis in the UK?

Yes, in private practice, and more often than any other condition. No, as a routine NHS treatment — no cannabis-based medicine is licensed for chronic non-cancer pain in the UK, and NICE guideline NG144 recommends against offering one outside a clinical trial.

The gap between those two sentences is the whole story. NICE assessed whether the NHS should offer these medicines to a population of chronic pain patients and concluded the evidence did not support it. That guidance does not remove a specialist's legal ability to prescribe an unlicensed medicine to an individual with unmet clinical need. Private prescribing occupies that space, and the honest framing for it is a supervised trial in someone who has run out of better options — not an established treatment.

In practice this covers long-term back and neck pain, widespread musculoskeletal pain, post-surgical pain that never settled, and pain that no longer has a clear structural explanation. If your pain is specifically nerve pain, see neuropathic pain, where the evidence has been studied separately.

What the evidence actually shows

Randomised trial evidence in chronic non-cancer pain is thin, mostly short, and mostly small. The larger body of UK data is observational — real-world outcomes from patients already being treated, which cannot separate the medicine from expectation, natural fluctuation, or the effect of finally being taken seriously.

The UK Medical Cannabis Registry, run through a UK clinic and analysed by researchers at Imperial College London, has published outcomes for chronic pain patients showing improvements in pain-specific scores and health-related quality of life, with mostly mild-to-moderate side effects. The authors are explicit that causation cannot be inferred from this kind of study, and that randomised trials are still needed. That is the state of the field: encouraging signals, no proof.

Read alongside it the NICE conclusion, which is drawn from the same literature and reaches a different conclusion because it is answering a different question. We unpack that tension in Can medical cannabis treat my condition?

What a specialist will want to see

There is no UK list of qualifying conditions, so nothing here entitles you to a prescription. A specialist works through your history and decides whether a monitored trial is justified for you. For chronic pain they will typically look at:

• How long the pain has lasted, where it is, and whether there is a diagnosis behind it
• Which standard treatments you have tried — typically at least two — and why each was stopped or judged inadequate
• Whether you are on opioids, gabapentinoids, antidepressants or benzodiazepines, and at what doses
• What you actually want to change: pain scores, sleep, function, or reducing another medicine
• Your personal and family history of psychosis, and your current mental health
• Whether you drive, and whether you work in a safety-critical role

The general requirements — age, a documented diagnosis, the convention that two standard treatments have been tried, and access to your medical records — are covered in What are the requirements?

Risks and reasons a specialist may say no

The common side effects are dizziness, drowsiness, dry mouth, appetite changes and difficulty concentrating. THC-containing products can impair driving, and it is an offence to drive while impaired even with a valid prescription.

A specialist is likely to decline, or to proceed only with a very cautious plan, if you have a personal or family history of psychosis or schizophrenia, an unstable serious mental illness, significant cardiovascular disease, or if you are pregnant or breastfeeding. High-dose opioid use alongside cannabis-based medicines needs care rather than an automatic no.

Chronic pain is also the condition where expectations most often outrun what the medicine can do. A realistic target is a modest improvement in pain and function that makes the side effects worth it — not the disappearance of pain.

If you want to take this further

The useful next step is a proper assessment, not a better list. Gather your diagnosis, the treatments you have already tried and what happened with each, and your current medicines — that is what a specialist needs in order to give you a straight answer.

The consultation itself, and what happens after it, is set out in What is the process to get a medical cannabis prescription? If chronic pain is not the only thing you are being treated for, say so early: other conditions and other medicines change the assessment.

Patient guide · Written by the Flora House editorial team · Last reviewed: 31 August 2026