Germany Grew Medical Cannabis Sixfold in Kilos and Barely at All in Euros

Germany imported 201.1 tonnes of cannabis for medical and scientific purposes in 2025. That is 6.19 times the 32.5 tonnes of 2023, 2.76 times the 72.9 tonnes of 2024, and roughly 551 kilograms a day. Dispensed through pharmacies at the prices patients actually paid, that mass was worth EUR 988.5 million.

Sixfold growth in kilos, in a year in which the average price patients paid for a gram of flower fell 37.2 per cent. The two facts are not in tension. They are the same fact: this market grew in mass and almost not at all in money.

The statute, not the clinic

On 1 April 2024 the Medizinal-Cannabisgesetz took cannabis for medical purposes out of the narcotics schedules and made it an ordinary prescription-only medicine. No narcotics prescription. No statutory insurer’s approval standing between the prescription and the pharmacy counter. Two administrative frictions, both removed on the same day.

What followed is documented by the ministry that now wants part of it reversed. Between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2025 imports of flower rose from roughly 19 tonnes to roughly 80 — the ministry’s own account describes an increase of more than 400 per cent; on its own rounded figures the arithmetic is +321 per cent — while prescriptions charged to statutory health insurance rose by single digits.

A market whose import volume quadruples while insurer-paid prescriptions barely move is not treating four times as many sick people. It is selling to a different payer. The marginal kilo in Germany is a self-payer holding a private prescription obtained through a telemedicine platform, in many cases without a face-to-face contact with either the physician or the pharmacist. The official growth series and the official prescription series are not measuring the same population, and the distance between them is the subject of the report behind this article.

Value is mass multiplied by price, and the two moved apart

Pheonix builds this market as dispensed mass multiplied by realised pharmacy price, rather than asserting a growth rate and working backwards. 201.1 tonnes at a 72.5 per cent sell-through — an assumption, stated as ours, because no German authority publishes the share of imported mass that reaches a patient — gives 145.8 tonnes dispensed. At a mean of EUR 6.78 a gram across the year’s price series, that is EUR 988.5 million.

The sell-through assumption is load-bearing, so it is worth saying what it costs. Every five points of it is about EUR 68.2 million of 2025 value, and the 55.3 tonnes it leaves out of the patient market has to be stock build, quality rejects, destruction, or product that leaves Germany again. Anyone who prefers a higher number can substitute it; that is the point of showing the parameter.

That band — EUR 1,017.4 million to EUR 2,103.4 million — is wider than we normally publish, and the width is the argument. Mass growing at 4 to 11 per cent a year and price falling at 1 to 3.5 per cent a year multiply into a broader answer than any single rate compounds into. The base case is simply 1.07 × 0.98, which lands at 4.86 per cent. One point of CAGR is worth EUR 384.2 million of 2033 value, which is the honest measure of how much a forecast of this market is worth.

The growth mechanism and the corrective instrument are the same object

The draft amendment now in committee, Bundestag Drucksache 21/3061, would require a personal consultation and prohibit mail delivery of flower. Read as a compliance measure, it is modest. Read against this market’s growth mechanism, it removes both properties of the channel that produced the growth at once: a prescription obtainable at arm’s length, and a product delivered to an address.

This is why the forecast is flat, and why a flat forecast is not a pessimistic view of clinical demand. If the binding constraint were the number of Germans with a condition cannabis treats, a consultation requirement would be a light tax on that demand. Applied to volume that arrives through a prescription form filled at a distance, it is the removal of the distribution system.

Statute is not the only instrument already doing this work. Two court judgments — in June 2025 and March 2026 — have tightened the channel without any new law passing, and the European Commission’s free-movement objection runs alongside the German bill rather than against it. The regulatory chapter of the report sets out each of these separately, because they constrain different things: one the prescriber, one the courier, one the treaty.

EUR 2 billion is not a market size

A figure roughly double 2024’s is in circulation for this market, sourced to an industry association. It does not survive contact with the other two series. EUR 2 billion spread across 201.1 imported tonnes implies EUR 9.95 a gram even if every gram reached a patient — above the highest monthly average of the year. At actual sell-through it implies EUR 13.72 a gram. Or, holding December’s price, it implies 382.4 tonnes dispensed, nearly twice what entered the country.

The import record’s theoretical ceiling — every gram, at the lowest price in the series — is EUR 5.23 a gram, or EUR 1,051.8 million. Two billion is not a rounding error away from that. It is a different measurement.

It is, however, perfectly consistent with a reimbursement basis: covered prescriptions can be charged at up to EUR 19.04 a gram, and a market quoted on what payers are billed rather than what patients pay will always be a multiple of the cash market. The report prints the figure, dismantles it, and does not use it. If someone sends you EUR 2 billion for German medical cannabis, the paragraph above is the reply.

Where the volume actually comes from

Concentration at origin of that order is a purchasing outcome rather than a cultivation story. Three origins supply four fifths of the volume because three suppliers hold the export authorisations, the EU-GMP certification and the batch documentation that a German importer needs, and because a market that quadruples in eighteen months buys from whoever can ship in quantity this quarter. Domestic cultivation, projected in the trade press at around ten tonnes, is roughly a twentieth of 2025 imports and does not change that arithmetic. The report’s competitive chapter tracks the importer and distributor layer where the margin actually sits — which is not where the plant is grown.

The test that would falsify this

Every forecast should name the observation that would break it. Ours is this: if the personal-consultation requirement fails, or is delayed past the forecast’s first two years, and imports nonetheless flatten through 2026, then the channel was never the binding constraint and the flat base case is wrong for the right kind of reason. The opposite observation matters as much — a reacceleration of insurer-paid prescriptions after any tightening would mean the patient cohort is real and considerably larger than the prescription statistics suggest.

What we do not expect to see is the pattern of the last two years continuing: mass compounding at double digits while realised price falls faster. That combination has a floor, and the floor is reached when the cash payer’s willingness to pay meets the landed cost of an imported gram.

Method note

Volume is taken from the Federal Opium Agency’s import series for cannabis for medical and scientific purposes. Value is constructed as dispensed mass multiplied by realised pharmacy price, with a 72.5 per cent sell-through assumption disclosed in the method chapter and every parameter substitutable. Prices are taken from the monthly pharmacy price series rather than from list prices. Euro figures are the base; US dollar figures are converted at the ECB reference rate of 1.1193 for 23 October 2026 and the conversion is disclosed wherever a dollar figure appears. No syndicated estimate is used or cited, and the EUR 2 billion figure discussed above is reported and tested but plays no part in the forecast.

Related reading

• Germany Medical Cannabis Market Report, Size, Share and Forecast 2026–2033 — the full report, including the value-chain chapter on the 55.3 tonnes that never reach a counter.
• Global Cannabis Market Report, Size, Share and Forecast 2026–2033 — where Germany sits against the other federally regulated markets.
• Global Private Health Insurance Market Report, Size, Share and Forecast 2026–2033 — the payer whose behaviour the self-payer channel substitutes for.
• Global Online Medical Market — the prescription-delivery model this market was built on.