Medical cannabis is cannabis — flower, extracts and cannabinoid-based preparations — supplied in pharmaceutical quality and dispensed through a pharmacy against a prescription. It is a medicine category, not a consumer category, and almost every commercial feature of it follows from that: the unit of trade is the gram at the pharmacy counter, the supplier must hold an EU-GMP manufacturing authorisation, and the state controls the physical movement of the product rather than merely its labelling.
The segment is distinct from adult-use cannabis and from non-medical CBD. Adult-use supply is regulated under separate frameworks and does not pass through a pharmacy; CBD wellness products are sold as consumer goods and are not medicines. Where a market legalises one and not the other, the two are frequently confused in public debate and never in the trade statistics — medical volumes are counted in kilograms of dispensed mass and authorised import permits, and those records are what this segment is measured from.
Supply is import-led. Very few markets grow enough domestically to serve their own patients, and domestic cultivation is capital-heavy, slow to license and, in most European markets, more expensive per gram than importing from an established producer in Canada, Portugal, Colombia or Southern Africa. A medical-cannabis market is therefore usually a trade flow before it is an industry.
The binding constraint is administrative, not agronomic. Under the international drug conventions, licit medical supply is bounded by a national estimate of requirement filed with the International Narcotics Control Board, and individual shipments require an authorisation from a national competent authority. A market can have demand, product and a willing exporter, and still not move a kilogram because a quota has been exhausted.
Value and volume decouple. Because the product is a near-commodity flower graded by THC content and terpene profile, and because the number of licensed suppliers keeps rising, unit price compresses as volume grows. A market can triple its mass and grow its revenue by materially less. Reading only the revenue line understates what happened; reading only the tonnage overstates what it was worth.
We size a medical-cannabis market from the mass that reaches patients, multiplied by the realised price per gram at the pharmacy. Authorised import volume is the most reliable published input, because it is a state record created one shipment at a time. It is not the same as dispensed volume, and the difference — re-exports, processing losses, regulatory clearance lag and inventory — is disclosed in every report in this segment rather than assumed away.