What official prescribing figures show—and what they cannot tell us about patients.
Prescribing and the evidence gap
Prescribing at scale. Patients still missing from the picture.
1,792,723
Private prescription items for unlicensed cannabis medicines, dispensed in England on prescriptions dated 2025.
Items, not a count of patients or smoking episodes.
What gets counted?
An item records a product appearing on a prescription form. NHSBSA’s separate response explains why it cannot reliably count distinct private patients.
2025 items, by the month the prescription was written
92,153Jan
89,097Feb
107,353Mar
113,824Apr
124,010May
137,670Jun
161,665Jul
153,003Aug
183,977Sep
195,470Oct
197,537Nov
236,964Dec
JBD calculation from the exact NHSBSA FOI-04096 Part 1 CSV. Dispensed in England; prescription-written month, rather than submission month.View the monthly figures as a table
Prescription year/month
Items
202501
92,153
202502
89,097
202503
107,353
202504
113,824
202505
124,010
202506
137,670
202507
161,665
202508
153,003
202509
183,977
202510
195,470
202511
197,537
202512
236,964
Total
1,792,723
Items are counted
The supplied 127,916 CSV rows sum to 1,792,723 items. Product-name variants have not been deduplicated.
Patients are not fully identified
FOI-04092 says NHS numbers are captured on about 20–30% of private prescriptions, preventing reliable distinct-patient statistics.
Actual use needs different evidence
These figures do not count smoking, disclosure, treatment interruptions or prosecutions. FOI-04114 separately concerns NHS unlicensed prescribing and the identification risks in low numbers.
Read and reuse the evidence
Reporting lags, handwritten prescriptions and manual recording affect the dataset. Totals may change with later submissions. Do not treat these England figures as UK-wide, or divide them into an estimated patient count.