A new study has confirmed what critics of Germany’s 2024 cannabis reforms warned might happen. Consumers in the country’s medical cannabis market are gravitating toward the cheapest, most potent products available, and the evidence increasingly suggests this has little to do with medicine.

In 2024, Germany legalised limited recreational cannabis for personal use and home cultivation, while still prohibiting commercial sales. Alongside that change, the government also significantly expanded medical cannabis access. Regulators removed cannabis from the national narcotics list and simplified prescribing. That combination triggered a wave of telemedicine platforms and online dispensaries, all offering fast home delivery. Germany quickly became one of Europe’s most liberal medical cannabis markets. The study now raises a serious question: liberal for whom, and for what purpose?

What the Data Actually Shows

Researchers from German and Danish universities published the study in late June in the International Journal of Drug Policy. They tracked a full year of sales data from a single German online medical cannabis dispensary, running from December 2024 to November 2025. Using web-scraping methods every 15 minutes, the team collected roughly 24 million observations. After filtering, they retained about 6.5 million observations covering 996 distinct cannabis flower products.

The findings point to a market moving fast, and not in a direction that supports a genuine medical framing. Product listings grew from 266 in December 2024 to 401 by November 2025. Average THC content rose from roughly 23% to 26%. Prices, meanwhile, dropped sharply. The median price per gram fell 31%, from €8.64 to €5.95. The cost per 10mg of THC fell even further, down 36%, from €0.37 to €0.23.

Consumer behaviour tracked the price curve closely. Cannabis flower containing 20–29.9% THC accounted for more than two-thirds of all sales. Lower-potency products, those under 15% THC, the range more commonly associated with the limited conditions cannabis has actual clinical evidence for, barely registered with buyers at all. That gap between what the evidence supports and what people are actually buying is the real story here.

A Market Driven by Price, Not Medicine

The study’s authors were unambiguous about what this pattern reveals. They described a Germany medical cannabis market shaped far more by commercial competition than clinical necessity, and stated plainly that the demand for high-potency flower is not consistent with the available evidence for cannabis as a treatment, which remains confined to a narrow set of indications: non-cancer pain, spasticity and chemotherapy-induced nausea. Most of the clinical research underpinning even those limited uses involved cannabis extracts or low-THC flower, typically under 10% THC, not the 20-29.9% products now dominating German sales.

The risk side of that equation is not trivial. High-THC products have not demonstrated the same proven medical benefits as lower-potency formulations, and the researchers pointed to greater mental health risks associated with higher potency, with no evidence to date that any benefit outweighs that harm. The authors went further still, stating that current regulation of the medical cannabis market may not be consistent with the public health principles the 2024 reform was supposedly built on. In other words, a policy framed around patient need is, on the study’s own evidence, functioning as something closer to a low-barrier recreational marketplace with a prescription attached.

The researchers were careful to note their data came from a single dispensary rather than every online platform and pharmacy in the country. But the pattern they describe is far from an isolated case. Canada and the United States saw the same trajectory as their own cannabis markets expanded: more products, more competition, falling prices, and a steady consumer drift toward stronger and stronger formulations. Wherever commercialisation leads, potency and price appear to follow the same script.

A Market Growing Fast, With Few Brakes

The scale of Germany’s shift is hard to overstate. Prohibition Partners estimated the German medical cannabis market at close to $997 million in 2025, making it the largest in Europe. Import volumes tell the same story. Germany’s Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices recorded more than 205 tons of medical cannabis imported in 2025, up from roughly 62 tons in 2024, the year reforms took effect. That growth has continued into 2026, with first-quarter imports reaching 50.5 tons, compared with 37.6 tons over the same period the previous year. This is not the profile of a tightly regulated therapeutic market. It is the profile of an industry scaling as fast as demand allows it to.

Regulators Are Already Backpedalling

The rapid rise of online prescribing has become a genuine political flashpoint in Germany, and for good reason. In response, the government is now proposing stricter rules for medical cannabis access, including a requirement for in-person doctor visits before patients can receive flower prescriptions, along with mandatory in-person pharmacy pickups rather than home delivery.

That the government is already moving to close these gaps says as much as the study itself. When a market billed as medical produces consumer behaviour indistinguishable from a recreational one, driven overwhelmingly by price and potency rather than clinical guidance, the honest conclusion is not that regulation needs fine-tuning. It is that the system, as designed, has not been functioning as a medical framework at all.

Source: Forbes