I started a cannabis prescription after taking out life insurance — do I need to tell them?

A common patient story: someone takes out level-term life insurance in their thirties, everything's clean at the time, and then two years in they're diagnosed with a condition that eventually leads to a specialist cannabis-based prescription. The premium's been coming out of the current account for months. The obvious question follows: do I need to phone the insurer?

The answer sits inside the shape of a UK life insurance contract, and once you see the shape, the answer's clear.

Where the duty of disclosure actually lives

The Consumer Insurance (Disclosure and Representations) Act 2012 (CIDRA) sets the framework. The duty it imposes on you as a consumer is a duty to take reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation to the insurer before the contract is entered into or varied. That's the crucial wording. The duty crystallises at application; it doesn't renew every month for the life of the policy.

Once the insurer has your answers, priced the risk and put you on risk, the contract is set. If your answers were honest and complete at the time you gave them, you've discharged the CIDRA duty. Your health can change tomorrow, next year or a decade in, and it doesn't reach back and turn last year's honest answer into a misrepresentation.

Why insurers price it this way

Guaranteed-premium life insurance is priced with an expectation that health will change — that's most of what the underwriter is being paid to predict. The insurer builds average deterioration into the premium already. If they wanted the right to reprice or add exclusions when new conditions or medications appeared, they'd sell a different product (reviewable cover, or a rolling underwriting product), and they'd charge less for it because you'd carry more of the risk.

Reading a "you must tell us about any change" duty into a standard guaranteed-premium life policy would fundamentally rewrite what you bought. That's why insurers don't do it and why the standard consumer policy wording doesn't ask.

The exceptions worth knowing

There are four situations where a mid-policy prescription genuinely can matter.

1. Between application and going on risk. If you submitted an application, your terms were offered, but the policy hasn't yet gone live, health changes in that window can be disclosable — insurers commonly ask you to notify anything material before cover starts. If your prescription started in that window, tell them.
2. Reviewable-premium products. Some critical illness and family-protection products review the premium every five or ten years. Reviews look at portfolio-level claims experience, not your individual health — but read the specific product wording.
3. Waiver-of-premium and critical-illness benefits. If you claim under one of these benefits, current health information (including prescriptions) is directly relevant to whether the claim pays. That's a claim question, not a duty to volunteer information beforehand.
4. Policy variations. Increasing the sum insured, adding a new life, or converting a term to a whole-of-life policy is a variation — CIDRA's disclosure duty is triggered again for the change. At that point, your prescription is on the table.

Will my claim be paid?

This is the anxious version of the question. For a straightforward life claim on an in-force, guaranteed-premium policy where your original answers were honest: yes. The insurer will investigate any death claim — that's standard — and will look at your original application against your medical records for evidence of non-disclosure at the time you applied. A prescription that started years after the policy went live is not that.

The scenarios where claims genuinely get contested are non-disclosure at application (e.g. undisclosed symptoms or investigations underway when you signed), fraud, or specific policy exclusions. A new medication years into cover isn't in the picture.

What to actually do

• Read your policy document — specifically any section labelled "changes in circumstances", "your duties", or "conditions". If it doesn't require you to notify medication changes, you don't have to.
• Keep records. Save prescription copies, clinic letters and any GP-sync correspondence. If you ever need to demonstrate the timeline, you'll have it.
• Update your GP if the prescription is private. Not for insurance reasons — for clinical continuity. But it also means any future medical-records request paints one consistent picture.
• Ask an FCA-regulated adviser if you're planning to increase cover, add benefits, or take out a new policy alongside the existing one. That's the moment disclosure becomes live again, and it's the moment the wrong first step gets expensive.

For applications from scratch, see our full guide on how to disclose a cannabis prescription and the life insurance pillar. If a fresh application was declined, start here.