Releaf Group chief executive Gary Mackenzie has predicted that UK general practitioners could gain the authority to prescribe medicinal cannabis within the next 12 months, as the Australian cannabis franchise takes its first steps into the British market.
Current UK regulations restrict medicinal cannabis prescribing to specialists only, a framework the industry has been pushing hard to change.
A lobbying campaign is underway to ease those restrictions, with advocates arguing that patients are being denied potentially life-changing medication under the existing rules.
Mackenzie, who opened Releaf's first UK wellness dispensary in February under the brand name Verday, said that any reforms expanding access to medicinal cannabis could prompt Releaf to accelerate its growth plans in Britain.
For now, the company's focus is on wellness dispensaries, with 25 high street locations planned through a franchise model.
Physical clinics could be added to the mix once cannabis prescribing becomes more widely available.
"Essentially we're rolling out a high street pharmacy model in the UK," Mackenzie said. "They're wellness pharmacies focused on plant-based medicines and hemp protein-related products.
"We're not setting up physical bricks and mortar clinics as we have in Australia, but we may do that in the future."
When asked whether he believed reform was coming, he said: "There's a lot of lobbying going on to move it {cannabis] into the GP realm and I would be confident that in the next 12 months there could be some change there. That's probably when we'll focus more on building physical clinics. But I didn't want to invest money into a market there where we can't really operate like we can in Australia."
The initial plan, he said, involves a consulting specialist operating out of the Verday dispensaries, while the company will also form partnerships with clinic services and "start dispensing that way".
"We've spent two years working on this," Mackenzie said. "We've got deals with all the wholesalers and some staff over there, so it's a UK start up, leveraging off the knowledge and relations we have built in Australia.
"I would say 99.9% of the dispensing in the UK happens from a warehouse, a virtual pharmacy. But we're moving into the high street, focusing more on wellness [and] plant-based medicine. It's not set up specifically to do cannabis although that will be one of our product lines."
Mackenzie explained that the Verday name was chosen because another company is already trading under the Releaf name in the UK.
"It's a very common name. There's also a few Releafs in the US so we thought [of] another name we could use while keeping the same sort of branding and colour schemes."
