Natural products including plants, fungi and cacti have been used for thousands of years to successfully treat and manage a wide variety of medical ailments. Many of these natural products are readily accessible to the public for purchase legally however a large number of natural products that have significant medical and therapeutic value; including cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms, are illegal to possess and sell in the UK.

Many countries, notable the United States and Canada, have already begun to decriminalise these natural products as their medicinal and therapeutic uses are being demonstrated by the scientific community, however the UK is not which means that hundreds of thousands of people are suffering needlessly as they cannot legally access the medicinal plants which have been shown to treat these conditions; such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, which science still does not fully understand nor know how to effectively treat. Why?

It should be noted, however, that whilst licences have been issued in the UK for prescribing cannabis-derived medicines (i.e. Dronabinol) these are only indicated for the treatment of a small number of conditions and as such are largely unavailable as a treatment option in the majority of cases, even though these natural products have been shown to be effective in the treatment and management of other conditions.

This is also not the case for other natural products such as psilocybin mushrooms and mescaline cacti which is why this petition is not solely focused on the decriminalisation of Cannabis but is calling for the decriminalisation of ALL natural products.

This petition proposes that whilst the possession and sale of these natural products be decriminalised that the possession and sale of the extracted and refined chemical compounds remain a criminal offence until such a time that regulations exist for these compounds.