Bosnia sets a deadline for its stalled medical cannabis rules

Bosnia and Herzegovina approved cannabis-based medicines at the end of 2025. Six months later the people responsible met to establish why no patient had received any.

What had been decided

On 29 December 2025 the state’s Council of Ministers moved cannabis, its resin, extracts and tinctures from the table of prohibited substances to the table of substances under strict control. That made a cannabis-based medicine legally possible. It did not say who may prescribe it, for what, or in what dose.

Those questions belong to the entities, in rulebooks on prescribing and dispensing medicines.

The meeting

A conference of health ministers on 8 April 2026 confirmed that the rulebooks needed amending. A round table followed on 23 April. On 6 July the Ministry of Civil Affairs called everyone back, because, in the words of the report, “no concrete activities” had been undertaken since.

Present were the Federation’s health ministry, the state medicines agency, the pharmacists’ chambers of both entities, the association of paediatric neurologists, members of the Federation’s parliament, and patients.

What was agreed

• The Federation’s health ministry is to draft the amendments by 1 August 2026.
• Within fifteen days it is to meet specialists in oncology, neurology, paediatric neurology, infectious diseases and anaesthesiology.

The rulebook has to settle the indications, the medical specialties allowed to prescribe, registers of doctors and patients, doses and pharmaceutical forms, and how the medicines are dispensed.

Why the delay blocks everything

The medicines agency set out the chain. A country must send the International Narcotics Control Board an annual estimate of its needs before a controlled drug can be imported. Without a defined system of prescribing and distribution, the agency cannot produce that estimate. Without the estimate, no import can be approved. Growing cannabis for medicine remains prohibited, so imports are the only source.

The paediatric neurologists asked for speed, pointing to patients with drug-resistant epilepsy, for whom such medicines have been used elsewhere in Europe for years. Once the framework exists, the pharmacy chambers said, they could prepare matching formulations for both entities without delay.

The August deadline was not met. At a second follow-up meeting on 21 September, the Federation health ministry said consultations had produced a draft and sent it to the minister’s cabinet. It would not amend the existing rulebook during 2026, however, and instead planned a replacement in the first quarter of 2027.

In the index

This is why Bosnia and Herzegovina’s access score stays at 0 despite the December decision. The later delay is recorded separately. The index counts a route once a patient can use it.^[1][2]