Germany, two years on: what the data actually shows

Two years after the MedCanG law took effect in April 2024, the German medical market is no longer a reform story — it is a scale story. Removing cannabis from the narcotics list (BtMG) cut the bureaucracy around prescribing, and the market responded: we estimate German medical cannabis sales at over €836 million in 2025, rising to roughly €1.71 billion by 2029 — a compound annual growth rate of just under 20%, and just under two-thirds of all European medical sales.

The patient numbers tell the same story from the demand side. We put Germany's medical patient base at approximately 720,000 in 2025, roughly doubling to nearly 1.5 million by 2029. No other European market comes close in absolute terms: the UK, Europe's second-largest, reaches an estimated 238,000 patients by the same year.

Structurally, the market has matured into a full supply chain — importers, distributors, retail and online pharmacies, and telemedicine clinics — but it remains import-reliant. Domestic production is scaling up to compete internationally, and how quickly it does so will shape margins across the chain. On the adult-use side, cultivation associations have been established across several federal states, while uncertainty still surrounds the commercial pilot programmes lawmakers originally envisaged.

The practical read: Germany is now the reference market for European medical cannabis — the market whose regulatory settings, pricing and supply dynamics set expectations everywhere else. Anyone modelling a European position starts here.