What does Schedule 2 mean for a cannabis prescription?

Schedule 2 is the reason your prescription has rules that an antibiotic does not: how long it lasts, how it is written, how the pharmacy stores it, and what you can do with it at a border.

Class and schedule are two different things

Class comes from the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and determines penalties for unlawful possession and supply. Schedule comes from the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 and determines what lawful medical and research use is permitted.

Cannabis remains a Class B drug. That has not changed, and it is why unlawful possession is still an offence with the same penalties as before.

What changed in November 2018 is the schedule. Cannabis-based products for medicinal use moved from Schedule 1, which is essentially research-only and requires a Home Office licence, to Schedule 2, which is where morphine and methylphenidate sit. Schedule 2 is a working medical category.

What Schedule 2 changes about the prescription

A controlled drug prescription carries requirements an ordinary one does not, and a pharmacy cannot dispense against a prescription that fails them.

• The prescription must state the form, the strength where relevant, and the total quantity in both words and figures
• It must be signed and dated by the prescriber
• It is normally treated as valid for 28 days from the appropriate date
• Pharmacies keep controlled drug registers and store Schedule 2 medicines in a controlled drugs cabinet

The 28-day convention is the one patients notice, because it shapes the rhythm of repeat supply. It is a limit on how long a prescription stays dispensable, not a limit on how much may be prescribed at once.

The mechanics of repeat supply are covered in How is medical cannabis dispensed and delivered?, and there are glossary entries for Schedule 2 and the 28-day rule.

What it means for carrying your medicine

Lawful possession follows from the medicine having been prescribed to you. There is no permit, and no card — what matters is that the medicine is identifiably yours.

In practice that means keeping it in the container the pharmacy dispensed it in, with the label intact, and not decanting it into something unlabelled. Supplying it to anyone else, including a family member with the same condition, is an offence regardless of your own prescription.

What happens in a police encounter is covered in What happens if the police stop you with a prescription?

Travel is where Schedule 2 bites hardest

UK rules on taking controlled drugs abroad are stricter than for ordinary medicines, and the destination country's law governs what happens when you arrive. A UK prescription confers nothing outside the UK.

For longer trips a Home Office personal licence may be required to take a controlled drug out of or back into the UK, and it does not authorise anything in the country you are travelling to. Several popular destinations treat cannabis-based medicines as prohibited imports whatever your paperwork says.

The detail, including the thresholds and the application, is in Can you travel abroad with a medical cannabis prescription?

What to do with this

Nothing on this page decides anything about your own case. What decides it is an assessment by a specialist who has seen your records, and the useful preparation is your diagnosis, the treatments you have already tried, and what happened with each.

None of these rules are unusual for a Schedule 2 medicine, and clinics and pharmacies handle them routinely. The consultation itself, and what happens after it, is set out in What is the process to get a medical cannabis prescription?

Patient guide · Written by the Flora House editorial team · Last reviewed: 8 September 2026