Inside one of the first licensed medical cannabis labs in Britain
A sweet smell wafts through the air, as two men weave through the small room tightly packed with cannabis plants, growing high above their shoulders in a flush of intoxicating flora. This isn’t yet another illegal weed factory but one of the first licensed medicinal marijuana labs in Britain.
Wielding a quantum sensor, microscope and leaf barometer to check in on the 180 plants growing up to 1.5 metres tall out of waist-height hydroponic planters, the two men are agronomists – experts in the science of crop production – at the West Midlands plant owned by Celadon Pharmaceuticals.
They want to ensure optimal light, oxygen, water and nutrient levels, and harvest the flowers after about nine weeks, from which cannabinoids are extracted and put into vials.
The cannabis grown for medicinal purposes is under tightly controlled conditions that ensure consistency and high quality across batches at a secret location by a startup created in 2018, the year Sajid Javid, the then UK home secretary, authorised its use.
Celadon is one of the few firms that grow medical cannabis in the UK but, unlike others, uses an indoor lab rather than greenhouses. This means it can produce five to six harvests each year and a much higher yield, it says, although an indoor lab is more expensive to run.
The company is following in the footsteps of GW Pharmaceuticals, a trailblazer that developed the first cannabis-based medicine to be licensed in the UK in 2010, Sativex for multiple sclerosis, which costs about £2,000 a year. However,NHS prescribing of the mouth spray remains very limited and varies across the country.
Javid’s decision to legalise medical cannabis in 2018 came after a long-running campaign waged by the parents of children diagnosed with
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