instead, mr sunak says his priority is curbing inflation and easing living costs. presidentjoe biden vows to continue us support for ukraine, after further military funding was excluded from a last—minute congressional budget deal. hardline republicans oppose further military aid, with many openly opposing biden�*s approach to the war. turkey says it has conducted missiles strikes on bases belonging to the kurdish rebel group, the pkk, in northern iraq. the strikes were in response to a suicide bomb attack near the turkish parliament in ankara. that's it from me, thanks for your company. now on bbc news — cannabis: prescription pot luck?

so, this is what 1,000 cannabis plants look like. these batches here are growing for the clinics in the uk. this is a film about a very controversial plant. so, i give alfie his cannabis oil four times a day. he would have these big seizures. so, eyes going back in your head, you stop breathing. without the cannabis, we'd be in hospital in a few days. cannabis has been legal in the uk as a medicine for five years. i would like to make a statement on the medical use of cannabis. it's legalised, but it's not freely available for me to prescribe. so, i think it's outrageous. i think it's actually a scandal that. so little has happened in the nhs. we've been up and down the uk meeting those who rely on it... 0h, mercy.

once i vape, it's like 30 seconds, i'm like, "0hh!" the pain just leaves. ..and find out why being prescribed medicinal cannabis is still a problem. these products are not available within our much—loved nhs free at the point of need. it's expensive and it's something i can't... i i can't live without. morning. are you looking forward to school? are you going to put your order in for breakfast? where's table seven, is it down here? oh, you're cute. alfie's my first—born. he's coming up to 12 years old. he has severe epilepsy. he's also diagnosed with autism. and he's a very special little boy, as far as i'm concerned.

this will be familiar to many. a busy family morning routine. who do you want to ask to do your meds? there's one major difference in the dingley household, though. what about annie doing them, why doesn't annie do them? good boy, well done... alfie is taking his epilepsy medicine and he really needs it. his neurologist said he has the worst epilepsy he's ever seen. he would have about 150 of these big seizures. so it's arms, legs, eyes going back in your head, you stop breathing. i got up very early in the morning and sat with him and looked out the window and i held his hand and i thought about what his funeral might be like, because i thought he was going to die. they brought us into a room and said, "we've tried everything "and we're going to... "the last thing we're going to give him is intravenous "steroids and, if this doesn't work, he will probably die." alfie and his family have come a long way in the last decade, thanks to a different

kind of medicine. so, i give alfie his cannabis oil four times a day. so it comes in a ioml bottle of oil. draw the oil out into the syringe, and then we get it into him before he goes to school. thank you! alfie's family get his cannabis on the nhs. he was the very first child in the country to be given it. without the cannabis, we'd be in hospital in a few days with hundreds of seizures, needing to load him with rescue medications to stop his seizures. and it is terrifying. alfie hasn't had a seizure for over three years, so alfie hasn't been in hospital for over four years. he was costing the nhs anything between £150,000 and £200,000 a year. and he's not now.

many people watching this will think you're giving your child something that will get him high, that we know can induce psychosis. what do you say to that? i would say that that's a massive lack of education because my son has been high on anti—epileptics, he's been completely off his head on pharmaceutical drugs. he's never been high on cannabis. so, i'm dr david mccormick, i i am a consultant paediatrician, and we're in king's college hospital, london. - and you can prescribe cannabis? i can prescribe one cannabis derived medical product to treat _ epilepsy in children. david's talking about a medicine with cbd in it. it's approved or licensed for use in the uk. it can only be prescribed on the nhs for very specific conditions. many health problems like alfie's aren't on the list,

but the public were told he could now prescribe the whole cannabis plant, which hasn't been given a licence. it has thc in it, the stuff that can make you high. this is what campaigners say works for a wide range of conditions. but there's a problem. it's legalised, but it's not freely available for me to prescribe. . so, this is complicated. the licensed products have gone - through a safety regulation process. we know exactly what's in them and we know how much to give. and the unlicensed products? the unlicensed productsl could have a whole range of substances in them. so, we literally don't know what people are getting. l and it's this version of cannabis, the whole plant, that's almost impossible to get on the nhs. the message went out, _ doctors can now prescribe cannabis derived medicinal products. as doctors, that put us - in a difficult position because, in truth, we need to apply for cannabis to be -

approved by nhs england. the issue is, whole plant cannabis isn't on any hospital's list of approved medicines. i would like to see better evidence for their efficacy and safety. - so, at this time, i don't quite feel the evidence for me is there. - when consultants want to prescribe it, they have to ask the nhs to make an exception and they're almost always turned down. it does mean we find ourselvesl in a strange situation right now, in the sense that these products are not available within our - much—loved nhs, free at the point of need. l so it seems alfie's prescribed cannabis is an exception and we want to know why. there are a small number- of children who were approved for individual supply. we therefore have an inequity that ia handful of children are getting i these whole plant products _ and they're supplied by the nhs and, when we apply for funding i for others, that is declined. the government told us any decision

to prescribe medical cannabis is made by an independent panel of experts. it says, if funding isn't approved, it can't intervene. well, women are shy, so we're not used to showing our bodies. who am i? ok, i'm amanda lowe. i'm originally from bermuda. i'm a reggae singer songwriter. i'm also a breast cancer survivor. amanda is another cannabis user. she gets the drug not through the nhs but via a private clinic. she's currently taking part in a modelling competition. but to get through a day like this, amanda has to take her meds. she vapes cannabis. it comes in a canister.

take the cap off. so, because i'm allowed 1g a day, i put that on my scale first. and then, once it's measured out, i take it and i grind it up. 0nce that's done, then i have to heat up, and then i vape it. amanda's private prescription is completely legal. a clinic provides it for chronic pain after she had a life—changing diagnosis. so i'm laying in bed, and then i felt something here on my breast. i'm like, "oh, really?" then i got the call from my doctor and told me to come in. and that's when she told me... "you got breast cancer." how many operations did you have? in total, we're looking at 1a. they removed my breast, but i made the decision to use my own fat up in my chest. when you wake up from such a massive surgery, you're so dosed with pain medication. once it wore off, i basically screamed down that hospital.

amanda has been living with chronic pain for nearly ten years. she says cannabis is the only drug that works for her. it doesn't matter what i'm doing. just literally feels like somebody has taken their fist and just literallyjust punched the side of my chest in. my whole body is tense, there's absolutely nothing that i can do. but once i vape, it's like 30 seconds, i'm like, "0hh!" professor david nutt knows a thing or two about cannabis. he's a neuropharmapsychologist. cannabis has been legal for medical use since 2018. we now need to look more closely at the use of cannabis based medicines in the health care sector in the uk — it was almost as if they gave it

with one hand and took it - away with the other. unfortunately, by constraining . the prescriptions to consultants, that made it almost unavailable i to the people that really need it, the people who are in primary care. gps can't use it. fewer than five nhs patients have been prescribed whole plant cannabis in the last five years. i think it's outrageous. i think it's actually a scandal that. so little has happened in the nhs. most doctors will not prescribe any medicine until two things happen. i the first is that a drug company does a trial and tells them - that they can prescribe it - because they've got a licence. and the second is that nice, our national institute - that guides prescribing, says it's cost—effective.| and with medical cannabis, neither of those things have happened. - the private sector have - embraced this because they have seen the value. we know over a million people a day in the uki are using medical cannabis, - but almost all of them are getting

it from the illegal market - and that has major problems. they don't exactly know what they're getting - and they're breaking the law. so it's not surprising that some of them want to go and get it l prescribed in the private sector. good to meet you. thank you so much for today. thank you. as professor nutt went on his travels, so did we. you see lemon groves, you see oranges, avocados are a big fruit that they're growing... is avocado a fruit? yeah _ because you see all of that here, the last thing you expect to see is cannabis. we're off to see where some of the uk's medical cannabis comes from. this is our medical cannabis farm. you've come on a nice day. sunshine is very important to us.

plants run on sunlightl and we've got lots of it here in the south of portugal. euan used to grow fruit in the uk, but he's swapped berries for buds. my history was growing i strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cut flowers. in 2017, i could see that - legislation was going to change and that medical cannabis was going to become - a thing of the future. i'm a grower and i guessj a bit of an entrepreneur, so i thought, why not? let's have a go. this is where the magic happens. so, this is what 1,000 i cannabis plants look like. these batches here are growing for the clinics in the uk. - this is the first time journalists have been given access to this facility. this is the blend between farming and pharma. - so we say "pharming" with a ph. every plant has a barcode. and we record the historyj of every plant so we know where it is in the facility and what the history-

of that plant is. we're producing something that's going to go to people _ who are medically ill. so we must make sure _ that we grow very uniform crops, very consistent crops and very safe crops. i this is really the best, really the best one that we have. so, today we are harvesting. it's basically cutting out the plants, put them in the boxes. this year the farm will produce two tonnes of medical cannabis. in five years, that's predicted to be 20 tonnes. they are my babies. i come here in weekends to check on them. they are absolutely my babies. but, of course, this is big business. in 2019, the uk's medical cannabis industry was worth less than £160,000. by next year, it's expected to be worth a billion.

i do have some concerns i about that private industry, mostly because i don't knowl what these products contain, how much my patients are getting, land what effects that might havel on them in the long term. we're not in this for a fast buck, so we need to keep the patient in the forefront of everything that we do, and that's where our success will come. at the end of the day, the more patients are helped, the more doctors will prescribe and the more successful our business will be. then i press this. so this is the cannabis. flower and this is where all the goodness is. we just cut it off the stem. it's now going to go _ through our trimming machine where these leaves will be shaved off the side — this is now packed up and sent to private patients. but none of this crop, not a single flower, will be available on the nhs. i've seen the stigma surrounding cannabis reduce massively, - so that's really good, _ but i'm disappointed that the pace of change hasn't been faster.

yes, we would love it to be available on the nhs. - i was diagnosed with tourette's when i was 13. a lot of it was farmyard animal noises, banging, barking, a very shrill noise — like — almost like the noise a fire alarm makes when it's out of battery. conor is a customer of this booming market. it builds up over time. winking, blinking, rolling my shoulder. this is the one that often gives me a lot of pain. sorry, my anxiety�*s starting to build up again. over the years, he's tried lots of different prescription drugs. every medication that they've been able to give me, some of them sort of work but they made me into basically a zombie.

according to the latest figures, conor�*s private prescription is one of more than 140,000 handed out since medical cannabis became legal. i use a medicinal vaporiser. i grind up the flower and it blows really hot air through it into a bag, and then ijust take it through the bag. he says he's had no choice but to go private. i spoke to my doctor and he said that he didn't want to refer me, so i went and referred myself. i went and looked at the clinics. it's about £300 a month. we skimp and save where we can in order to be able to afford it, basically. we are going through our savings. i'm hoping that soon, i'll be able to work and maybe be able to manage it, because that's the only way if it doesn't become available on the nhs.

does it make you high? initially, it made me very high but after a few days of taking it, it's a mild buzz at most. tourette's — it's something i dreamed of as a kid, you know, taking a small pill and it would just disappear and now, i have it, basically. sings music is me, it's like a second breath in me, and for me to be in a studio again — oh, mercy. after her catwalk debut, amanda is home in hampshire, working on her reggae album. it took me through a lot, especially when i was going through my trials and tribulations with my mastectomy and all the pain. but today is another one of those days.

she has a severe pain attack. 0h, mercy. groans this is the part where i don't want to deal. i've had enough because it just... the pain comes from nerves damaged after 1a cancer operations. this is the pain that puts me down on bended knees. to be riddled continuously, it's like, mm—mm, ijust don't want to be here no more. take this last one. i walk in pain 24/7 but because i have this medicine now, i can vape it and to know that within a couple of minutes, a couple of seconds, my body's feeling much better. amanda gets her cannabis from a private prescriber but that wasn't always the case — she was one of millions getting the drug from the streets. 0n the streets, it would be, for 7g, it'd be like £55, £60.

it was expensive but then, that would last like two weeks and then, i've got to try to find some way to get some more money. it's a familiar story. it's estimated that 1.8 million medicinal cannabis users get the drug illegally. but amanda's private prescription still comes at a price. what i'm left with after i pay my rent and my bills, that's basically everything. so, you're sort of choosing between food and weed sometimes? definitely, because i need my medication but i also need food. and itjust — come on now. come on. you need to put this onto the prescription. it will make a world of a difference. it will make my life much easier to live. #0h... what i think about is the fact - that there could be something that could help this go away — - a plant that could stop all this, that we're not allowed to use. the 27th of may, 2012 — i never forget the day. i

i was woken at midnight by him screaming and i ran in to him i and he had a massive seizure. we were just thrown into this world that i didn't know existed, - and it was really frightening. the years of alfie's relentless seizures took their toll on the whole family. my counsellor said, "you have ptsd," so i've done a lot of work to try and get better because i want to enjoy my children. hannah decided she had to take matters into her own hands and fight. and at that point, ijust thought, "ok, i need "to start trusting me". and all i did is i went onto google and ijust started researching natural ways of treating epilepsy. 0ne drug kept coming up again and again. i thought, "well, cannabis is a drug ofjoy and fun "and everyone takes it when they want to get stoned and eat biscuits". i had to do a lot of research and speak to a lot of families

all over the world — which i did — and then, i realised that it was a medicine. hannah started a high—profile campaign for cannabis to be legally available. we did loads of media — really, really went for it in the media, broadcast radio, newspapers. i met the prime minister on the 20th of march. it ended with a meeting with theresa may, who allowed us to apply for this licence and we got that licence injune'18. alfie picks up his cannabis prescription from the family doctor, who dispenses it under direction from a consultant. hello. hello there! hello. shall we shake hands? good man. _ it's very nice to see you. it's nice to see you. how many bottles do you want of that? - 13. it's an odd number, isn't it? 13. the thing to me was doing the right thing for alfie, . i and i'd seen the effect on alfie —| and, more importantly, his family. frankly, ijust wanted

to do anything that i i could do to improve it. you ready? - under the tongue. ifelt i'd changed history. and i felt my son's legacy was that millions of people would get access now to the treatment that he had, which was a wonderful feeling. but her sense of achievement didn't last long. i think they changed the law to take the wind out of my sails because i was a very effective campaigner. the campaign was very effective. all it's done is blocked it because all the parents now trying to get access for their children with epilepsy are blocked at every turn. and that broke my heart, actually, and that was sort of the beginning of when i realised that, actually, people weren't going to get access on the nhs. so, why is alfie getting cannabis on the nhs? because we ran a high—profile campaign and we were the first. the department of health

and social care told us... ..adding... five years after legalisation, here we are. only a handful like alfie are getting cannabis on the nhs. i'm contacted probably every day by parents who are desperate, who could get real benefit from this medicine, and they can't get it. and that's really incredibly sad. cannabis is still a drug that divides opinion. so, i think there's been this perception that it's some wonder drug or,

you know, magic bullet for these conditions. i think we need to be clear that these products are not going to help all children, they're going to help some children, but it is frustrating for those families that they don't at least have the chance to try them. we're onlyjust touching the very, very surface . of the power of cannabis. as patients struggle to access cannabis on the nhs, the private sector continues to grow. where i hope this industry- is going to be in ten years' time is that you'll be able to stand there and i'll be able - to say that this row- is a strain for bowel cancer, that row is a strain for epilepsy. but we've got a lot of work to do l as an industry to get to that point. the current landscape is certainly confusing. it was unhelpful that the public were told that doctors can now prescribe these products. i did feel it was disingenuous at the time because it shifted the heat from the government to practitioners like myself. parents were clamouring at our door because they believed we were now in a position to prescribe,

and that was not the case. for some reason, cannabis is treated much more cynically than the other medicines. probably — my belief is it's because it's come from the patients. i think doctors don't like the fact that patients have worked out that there's a medicine that can help them and they're asking the doctors to prescribe it. hannah's campaign for access to that most controversial of plants continues. i find it shocking that the government have literallyjust washed their hands of this problem. we've got the law changed. we've changed things. the doctors and the government have to move it forward and have to take it forward and i hope, in the next five years, i'd just see it being prescribed on the nhs. that would give me so much pleasure.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm arunoday mukharji. lets get you the headlines... at least 13 people have died in spain — after a fire engulfed a nightclub in the southeastern city of murcia. a special report from the french italian border,

as italy's prime minister warns europe will be "overwhelmed" by migration — unless the eu acts. the uk prime minister refuses to commit to cutting taxes before the next general election — despite pressure from his own mps. in the us, the speaker of the house says he won't go — as hardline republicans try to oust him for backing a the deal avoiding a government shutdown. meanwhile, president biden has this message for congress, over funding for ukraine. stop playing games. get this done. and indonesia prepares to launch the first high—speed railway in southeast asia after years of delay. live from our studio in singapore — this is bbc news. it's newsday.