Self-medication far outstrips use of prescription marijuana
The Trimbos institute is launching a major research programme to try to establish why users don’t go through the official channels
Monday, January 23, 2023
Most of the 130,000 people in the Netherlands who use cannabis as a medicine to help with depression or pain, for example, buy the plant from a coffee shop or grow it themselves, according to research by the mental health and addiction research institute Trimbos. If fact, only around 7,000 people actually have a formal doctors’ prescription for medical marijuana, even though the Netherlands has had a government run Bureau of Medicinal Cannabis since 2003, which issues cannabis of pharmaceutical quality to patients.