Germany Imports 201.1 Tonnes of Medical Cannabis as Price per Gram Falls 37.2% and a Bill Threatens the Channel

26 October 2026 — Germany imported 201.1 tonnes of cannabis for medical and scientific purposes in 2025 — 2.76 times the volume of 2024, roughly 551 kilograms a day, and 6.19 times the 32.5 tonnes of 2023 — while the market dispensed through pharmacies at prices patients actually paid reached EUR 988.5 million, according to a report published today by Pheonix Research.

Import volume multiplied sixfold against 2023 and the money did not follow, because the average price patients paid for a gram of flower fell 37.2 per cent between January and December of the same year. Those two statements describe one market rather than a contradiction: a market adding volume considerably faster than it adds revenue is not expanding, it is repricing.

Pheonix sizes the market at EUR 988.5 million in 2025 rising to EUR 1,445.4 million in 2033, a compound annual growth rate of 4.86 per cent — equivalent to USD 1,106.4 million and USD 1,617.8 million at the ECB reference rate of 1.1193 for 23 October 2026. The report publishes the band rather than the point estimate: EUR 1,017.4 million at 0.36 per cent to EUR 2,103.4 million at 9.90 per cent. The width is the argument, because 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 wider answer than any single rate compounds into.

A market created by a statute, measured through prescriptions

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, removing the narcotics prescription and the statutory insurer’s approval from the path between a prescription and a pharmacy counter.

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 — an increase the ministry’s own account describes as more than 400 per cent, and which on its own rounded figures 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 patients. 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 face-to-face contact with either the physician or the pharmacist. The official import series and the official prescription series are not measuring the same population, and the distance between them is the central finding of the report.

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 cannabis flower. Read against this market’s growth mechanism rather than as a compliance measure, it removes both properties of the channel that produced the growth at once: a prescription obtainable at arm’s length, and a product deliverable to an address.

That is why a market that has been growing at triple-digit rates is forecast at 4.86 per cent. The forecast is a view on how long the channel stays open, not on how many Germans have a condition that cannabis treats. Statute is not the only instrument already doing this work: 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.

Market size, 2025–2033

Value is constructed rather than adopted, so that a reader can substitute their own parameters. 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, that is EUR 988.5 million. Every five points of sell-through is worth about EUR 68.2 million of 2025 value, and the 55.3 tonnes the assumption excludes has to be stock build, quality rejects, destruction, or product leaving Germany again.

EUR 2 billion is a reimbursement number, 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 — or EUR 13.72 a gram at actual sell-through, or 382.4 tonnes dispensed at December’s price, nearly twice what entered the country. The import record’s theoretical ceiling, at EUR 5.23 a gram, is EUR 1,051.8 million.

It is, however, entirely consistent with a reimbursement basis, on which covered prescriptions can be charged at up to EUR 19.04 a gram. A market quoted on what payers are billed rather than on what patients pay will always be a multiple of the cash market. The report prints the figure, tests it, and does not use it.

Three origins supply four fifths of the volume

Concentration at origin of that order is a purchasing outcome rather than a cultivation story: three suppliers hold the export authorisations, EU-GMP certification and batch documentation a German importer needs, and 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.

About the report

Germany Medical Cannabis Market Report, Size, Share and Forecast 2026–2033 sizes the market from dispensed mass and realised price, takes apart the 55.3 tonnes that never reach a counter, maps the importer and distributor layer, and sets out the regulatory constraint stage by stage — the Medizinal-Cannabisgesetz, Drucksache 21/3061, the two judgments already tightening the channel, and the free-movement objection. A companion analysis, Germany Grew Medical Cannabis Sixfold in Kilos and Barely at All in Euros, examines why volume and value separated and what would falsify the flat forecast.

About Pheonix Research

Pheonix Research publishes market intelligence built from primary evidence and a disclosed method. Every published market size is constructed bottom-up from stated parameters and published with its sensitivity band, so that a reader can test the arithmetic rather than accept it.

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