Most of the 130,000 people in the Netherlands who use cannabis as a medicine to help with depression or pain, for example, buy the plant from a coffee shop or grow it themselves, according to research by the mental health and addiction research institute Trimbos. If fact, only around 7,000 people actually have a formal doctors’ prescription for medical marijuana, even though the Netherlands has had a government run Bureau of Medicinal Cannabis since 2003, which issues cannabis of pharmaceutical quality to patients.