Image courtesy of the Postal Museum
Comparisons with the Post Office Horizon scandal
Comparisons with recent systemic failures in public administration offer a useful sense of scale. The Post Office Horizon scandal, for example, involved several hundred wrongful prosecutions and an estimated 7,000–9,000 people materially affected, with compensation payments approaching £2 billion to date.
The Post Office Horizon scandal is recognised as a structural failure that persisted for years, simply because the system could not expose or process the evidence of harm.
In the context of medical cannabis, the affected population is significantly larger and the financial burden is shifted almost entirely onto disabled patients themselves.
Estimates suggest that illicit-market expenditure by medically self-medicating patients is plausibly in the £3–4 billion per year range – and growing.
The harm too is tangible and grossly unfair. Patients are forced to buy stronger strains of cannabis (potentially from organised crime gangs), with the inherent risks of unregulated supply, quality issues and very serious mental health side-effects such as psychosis. These risks are all but negated in using less strong, approved medical-grade, prescribed cannabis.
This harm ongoing, not historic; distributed, not isolated; and structurally invisible within the policy architecture.
The Post Office scandal wasn’t an aberration – it was a blueprint. It showed how quickly a flawed system can turn into mass injustice when Whitehall refuses to question its own assumptions. That same pattern is now replaying itself in the regulation of medicinal cannabis: systemic defects, institutional denial, and escalating harm to ordinary people. The architecture is different, but the template is identical – only this time, with medical cannabis, the scale is even larger.
When systemic failure hits entire populations
The Horizon scandal destroyed thousands of lives – but the structural failures around medicinal cannabis regulation affect far more people. Tens of thousands are already prescribed, hundreds of thousands could benefit, and millions are touched indirectly by GP refusal patterns, unequal access, and avoidable criminalisation. This isn’t niche policy failure: it’s a system built in a way that guarantees widespread harm.
Systemic similarities
The same Whitehall playbook, different domains. Both scandals follow the same institutional script:
- A flawed system deemed infallible
- Repeated warnings dismissed or buried
- Officials doubling down rather than course-correcting
- People punished because the system won’t admit its own defects
- Years of avoidable harm accumulating behind a wall of denial
Different departments, different policy areas but the same underlying failure mode. The architecture of injustice is identical.
A pattern hiding in plain sight
If Horizon teaches us anything, it is that large-scale failure rarely arrives all at once. It builds gradually – warning signs overlooked, responsibilities blurred, difficult evidence set aside – until the consequences can no longer be ignored. And when other public scandals are placed alongside it, familiar questions begin to emerge.
How did the infected blood tragedy persist for so many years despite early indicators of risk? Why did the Windrush failings only surface after irreversible harm had already occurred? What allowed building-safety concerns to drift between regulators in the years before Grenfell? How did the Post Office prosecutions continue unchallenged for so long, even as doubts mounted? Why have repeated failures in children’s safeguarding continued across agencies that each held fragments of the same warning? And what does the Afghanistan Inquiry reveal about decision-making structures in which responsibility becomes so diffuse that no one is positioned to intervene?
Different issues, different decades, different institutions – yet the deeper questions recur.
- When critical information sits across multiple bodies, who ensures anyone sees the whole picture?
- When internal systems are treated as infallible, how easily are early warnings dismissed?
- When concerns challenge established assumptions, what prevents them being absorbed rather than escalated?
- When statutory duties exist on paper, what guarantees that they shape the decisions being made?
- And when a risk spans departments, which part of government holds clear authority to act?
At this point, it becomes harder to view these as isolated episodes. Which naturally leads to a further question: If the same structural behaviours keep reappearing – fragmented oversight, deference to flawed systems, responsibilities passed between organisations – are these separate crises, or symptoms of a broader systemic dysfunction?
If Horizon could only be understood years after the harm was done, what does it mean when a comparable pattern is emerging now, in real time, with a full audit trail of how government is responding?
