The year 2025 was supposed to see the arrival in France of medical cannabis-based treatments. This will probably not happen, as the subject is at a standstill against a backdrop of almost general silence from health authorities and successive governments.
"The experimentation of the medical use of cannabis, launched in March 2021, will end on December 31, 2024," the National Agency for the Safety of Medicines (ANSM) confirmed to AFP at the end of December.
This experiment, conducted on several thousand patients, was intended to make it possible to decide whether the use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes could become a reality in France.
Although it is only permitted for recreational purposes in a few countries such as Germany, cannabis is used as a treatment, mainly for pain and anxiety, in most of the European Union (EU), as well as in several American states.
This is not the case in France, but it was on its way to becoming so. After several years of experimentation, the ANSM, which oversaw this, announced last February that the first cannabis-based treatments would be available in 2025.
Since then, nothing. The subject is particularly worrying for the approximately 1,800 patients still being treated as part of the experiment. They are faced with the prospect of an abrupt end to it, without being able to continue with a drug authorized by law.
Certainly, the Ministry of Health has just given them a reprieve: "a transition period" of six months from this Wednesday, January 1, reported the ANSM.
But it is explicitly about facilitating a "stoppage of treatment", in other words, allowing these patients to move on to other treatments.
There is therefore complete uncertainty regarding the future of medical cannabis in France, even if, from a medical perspective, the issue is not necessarily crucial.
– A lack of transparency –
The interest of medical cannabis is not in fact a consensus. In France, the Academy of Medicine, although rather conservative in its positions, is skeptical.
The research, however, is mixed. The main reference study, published in 2021 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and based on many other studies, concluded that medical cannabis improves the situation of patients in a “limited” or “very limited” way.
The problem lies first in the area of democratic transparency: the French experiment appeared to be a success under the terms that had been set for it. And the parliamentarians did indeed approve the introduction of cannabis-based treatments.
Why have these provisions never been implemented by the State? In 2024, no explanation was provided by the Ministry of Health, in a context certainly marked by strong political instability with four governments in one year.
Some actors nevertheless refuse to see this as the only explanation for this blockage, recalling that the experiment has constantly experienced postponements and setbacks over the years.
"Political instability probably did not help the progress of this issue, but it must also be said that recent governments seemed less and less favourable (...) to making access to these drugs a reality," Professor Nicolas Authier, who is supervising the scientific experiment, told AFP.
Is there a chance that such treatments will finally appear? According to Mr. Authier, such a choice can only be "political" and would then require at least six months of administrative procedures to become concrete.
The decision is therefore largely in the hands of the current Minister of Health, Yannick Neuder. Coming from the right and appointed in December to the Bayrou government, the new minister has in the past defended medical cannabis, while being intransigent against a decriminalization of its recreational use.
Asked by AFP, his office assured that the minister would make his position known "soon".
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