Drug Driving Or Prescription Use? Crown Court Draws The Line

On 10 February 2026, at Winchester Crown Court, medical cannabis patient Sal Aziz was finally cleared of drug driving charges after almost two years of stress, cost and professional damage. The Crown Court appeal overturned a magistrates’ court conviction that never should have stood in the first place.

The original report in Cannabis Health News gets the core facts out there. This piece looks at what actually went wrong in the system, why the appeal succeeded, and how it fits into the wider work that Aziz is already doing as Director of PatientsCann UK.

What happened to Sal Aziz

In March 2024, Aziz was stopped while driving friends home. He passed a roadside alcohol test and openly disclosed that he was a prescribed cannabis patient before taking a drug swab. There was no allegation that his driving itself was unsafe, but officers carried out a Field Impairment Test, formed an opinion that something was “off” and arrested him anyway.

A blood sample later showed 3.6 micrograms per litre of THC. For a regular medical user that figure is completely unsurprising. For the statute, anything above 2 micrograms triggers the “over the limit” offence under Section 5A of the Road Traffic Act.

Aziz was charged with two offences:

Section 4 – driving while unfit through drugs, which is based on impairment
Section 5A – driving with THC above the specified limit

By October 2025 he found himself in the magistrates’ court, representing himself without legal aid, supported by Seed Our Future founder Guy Coxall acting as a McKenzie Friend. The magistrates dropped the impairment charge but convicted him on Section 5A.

That conviction rested on a very specific prosecution theory: because more than 30 days had passed since the prescription was issued and the product had gone past the labelled expiry date, they claimed he was no longer “lawfully” using his medicine. In other words, the statutory medical defence should not apply at all.

How the Crown Court pulled that argument apart

On appeal, the Crown Court looked at the same set of facts and reached a very different conclusion.

A key defence witness, pharmacist Umesh Chauhan, explained a point that should have been obvious from day one: the 30 day issue is about prescribing and dispensing practice, not about criminality. Medical cannabis products are often prescribed “PRN” (as needed). For many patients, one prescription can last longer than 30 days without anyone doing anything unlawful.

Chauhan also made the simple comparison that using a medicine past the printed expiry is a patient safety question, similar to drinking milk past the date on the carton. It might be a bad idea, it might be fine, but it is not automatically a criminal offence.

The judge agreed. There is no law that says a Schedule 2 prescription suddenly becomes unlawful on day 31, or at midnight on the printed expiry date, unless the prescriber has explicitly restricted how long the medicine can be possessed or used. Once the statutory medical defence was properly raised, the burden was on the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it did not apply. They simply could not do that.

The result: full acquittal, two years of anxiety and disruption, and another example of a medical cannabis patient having to fix institutional misunderstanding at their own expense.

The statutory medical defence, in plain language

Section 5A sets a very low THC limit in blood. Almost any patient who takes a THC based medicine as prescribed is likely to sit above that number much of the time. Parliament knew this, which is why the law includes a statutory medical defence.

In simplified terms, you have a defence if:

the drug was prescribed or supplied for a genuine medical or dental reason,
you used it in line with the prescriber’s directions and any manufacturer guidance, and
your possession and use of the medicine was lawful.

Once that defence is raised with proper evidence, the duty shifts. It is not up to the patient to prove innocence. It is up to the prosecution to show that one of those elements fails. In Aziz’s case they tried to attack the “lawful use” leg with a creative story about prescription dates and expiry labels. On appeal, that argument collapsed.

Using your prescription is not the same thing as being impaired

A chronic mistake in public discussion is treating “THC in the bloodstream” as if it proves “impaired driving”. It does not.

Medical cannabis has a long half life and builds up in the body over time. A stable, tolerant patient can wake up over the legal limit without having dosed recently and without any actual functional impairment. This is why guidance from the Cannabis Industry Council and others stresses that THC concentration is a weak proxy for real world driving ability.

None of this means impairment is irrelevant. If someone is genuinely impaired, the system already has tools to deal with that, including the separate Section 4 offence and field impairment testing. The point is simpler and more uncomfortable for the state: thousands of legal patients are likely above the THC limit every day while functioning normally, working, caring for their families and driving safely.

Aziz’s case illustrates that line very clearly. There were no complaints about his driving. The impairment charge did not survive. What remained was a numbers based offence that should have been neutralised by the statutory medical defence from the start.

Who Sal Aziz is, beyond this one case

If this was just “man wins case”, it would still matter. In this instance the person at the centre is already doing serious work to drag the system into the present.

Aziz is Director of PatientsCann UK, a national organisation that focuses on practical patient rights, not just slogans. His public work includes helping to organise the first UK wide medical cannabis roadshow across all four nations, bringing patients, clinicians and advocates into the same rooms to challenge stigma with evidence.

He has also been directly involved in police engagement. After an earlier wrongful detention by Devon and Cornwall Police, Aziz wrote about the force openly admitting they were “ill equipped” to deal with lawful patients and inviting further dialogue. That dialogue turned into structured work with the Diverse Communities team, Serious Organised Crime, a Drug Expert Witness, a Road Traffic Officer and the Drug Impairment Lead at force headquarters.

Alongside Seed Our Future’s Guy Coxall, he has been part of presentations on the Road Traffic Act, saliva swab testing, custody processes and the basic fact that medical cannabis is a Schedule 2 medicine which should be treated in line with other controlled prescriptions, not as a special category of suspicion.

Training packages developed in Devon and Cornwall have already been shared with multiple forces. Processes are being put in place so that people in custody can access their prescribed medication. None of that fixes the law on its own, but it shows that patient led pressure can move policing culture when there is the will to listen.

What needs to change after this case

The Crown Court decision in Aziz’s case is not a binding precedent, and no one should pretend that it is. What it does do is expose how far practice has drifted from the actual law and from basic common sense.

If the statutory medical defence is going to mean anything, the following has to happen in reality, not just on paper:

Police forces need consistent training so that frontline officers understand what a Schedule 2 prescription is, what evidence they should seek at the roadside and in custody, and when arrest is genuinely necessary.
CPS lawyers need to stop stretching expiry dates and prescription windows into imagined criminal tests that do not exist in legislation.
Magistrates and judges need access to proper expert evidence on medical cannabis, pharmacokinetics and tolerance, rather than relying on gut instinct about what “looks impaired”.
Regulators and policymakers need to confront the numbers and acknowledge that tens of thousands of patients will read Aziz’s story and conclude that they could be next.

Aziz was articulate, persistent and well supported. He also had the knowledge and confidence to challenge a conviction and push it to appeal. Many patients will not. Some will accept guilty pleas they do not agree with just to make the process stop. Others will quietly give up driving or cut back medicine that keeps them stable, simply because the legal risk feels unbearable.

If the statutory medical defence is going to exist, it needs to be applied responsibly from the roadside onwards, not rescued at the last minute in front of a Crown Court judge. Until that happens, cases like this will keep surfacing, and people like Sal Aziz will continue doing the state’s homework for it.