Medical
Medical programmes, prescriptions, cannabis medicines, and patient access widened, narrowed or refused.
264 entries, 1839–2026 · 63 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Medical entries per decade
13.2 today, from 99.1 in 1860
World average score, every country counted the same Entries that moved a score Context only
No entries for the chosen countries here.
202620 entries0 score changes
🇺🇸 United States · Nebraska Medical ✓ Article
Nebraska's medical cannabis growers face an unfinished route to patient sales
Nebraska Public Media reports that commissioners advised licensed growers to prepare for one to two years of storage while manufacturing, distribution and testing arrangements are developed. Manufacturers and dispensaries were still unlicensed. The discussion establishes an implementation bottleneck, not a newly enacted waiting period or a guaranteed sales date.
🇪🇸 Spain Medical ✓ Article
Spain's first cannabis extracts are lined up for fifty hospitals
On 17 October Curaleaf, the only company so far to register a cannabis extract with the medicines agency, said its two preparations would start going to about 50 hospitals and could be available by the end of the month. A hospital specialist may prescribe a standardised preparation only after authorised medicines have failed, and the hospital pharmacy makes it up. The formulary makes that preparation an oral solution for muscle stiffness from multiple sclerosis, severe epilepsy, nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy, or chronic pain. One extract is richer in THC and the other in CBD. Ordinary pharmacies cannot dispense it.
🇺🇸 United States · Kentucky Medical ✓
Kentucky's medical dispensaries reach all eleven licensing regions
Sunnyside Dispensary opened in Prestonsburg on 12 October, becoming the first dispensary in the Mountain Region. The governor's 16 October announcement counted 26 operating dispensaries across all eleven licensing regions. This is a geographic rollout milestone within the existing medical programme, not a new adult-use law.
🇵🇫 French Polynesia Medical ✓
Nine growers are chosen for French Polynesia's cannabis pilot
Nine producers were selected for a one-year pilot under the 2024 law, with plants below 0.3% THC and first harvests expected in April 2027. A last arrêté designating the plots was still due.
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓ Article
Brazil's first legal cannabis cultivation rules take effect
Companies may grow low-THC cannabis for medicines and research under special authorisation, and patient associations may grow for their members in a supervised trial scheme.
🇳🇵 Nepal Medical ✓ Article
Gandaki authenticates a cannabis cultivation law
On 3 August 2026 the province chief authenticated Gandaki's Medicinal and Industrial Cannabis Cultivation Act, after first sending the bill back over a conflict with federal law. The gazetted text, section 1(2), starts the Act on a date fixed by a further gazette notice. A review on 13 October had not found that notice. No licence can be issued until the province makes rules under section 31. Licensed growing would be for medicinal and industrial use in designated zones, with THC capped at 0.3%, and growing without a licence stays a crime under the national narcotics law.
🇺🇸 United States · District of Columbia Medical ✓
Washington, DC temporarily changes medical-cannabis licensing and enforcement
Emergency Act 26-391 took effect on 30 July. It extends conditional medical-cannabis licences to up to three years and permits a zoning certificate instead of a certificate of occupancy in a permanent-licence application. A conditional licence still does not authorise cannabis trading or production. The Act also extends specified enforcement and summary-closure powers, with notice and hearing procedures. The regulator’s 31 August announcement says the emergency measure lasts until 28 October 2026; continued operation beyond that date requires a successor measure.
🇩🇪 Germany Medical ✓ Article
German health insurers stop paying for cannabis flower
From 30 July 2026 statutory health insurance no longer pays for dried cannabis flower. The health ministry's FAQ dates the same statute's entry into force as 29 July. Extracts in standardised quality, and medicines containing dronabinol or nabilone, can still be covered. A first insured prescription starts with a six-month trial of an authorised cannabis finished medicine. A patient already on an extract or a compounded preparation before 30 July can continue without that trial. A doctor can still prescribe flower as a private prescription.
🇧🇸 Bahamas Medical ✓ Article
The Bahamas still has not opened cannabis licensing
Two years after the cannabis legislation passed, the chairman of the Bahamas Cannabis Authority said the licence application portal had not opened; an earlier target of late June or early July had slipped. Applications will go through compliance checks and police vetting before the board decides, and every dispensary will need a registered pharmacist.
🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina Medical ✓ Article
Bosnia sets a deadline for its stalled medical cannabis rules
Six months after cannabis-based medicines were approved, a meeting called by the Ministry of Civil Affairs found that nothing had been done to amend the prescribing rulebook. The Federation's health ministry was given until 1 August to draft the changes; without them the medicines agency cannot file the estimate needed before imports are approved.
🇫🇷 France Medical ✓ Article
France sends its medical cannabis decree to the Conseil d'État
The decree sets out how the health authority will assess cannabis medicines and at what rate they are reimbursed. About 700 patients left in the pilot are covered until 31 December 2026; first prescriptions under a permanent regime are possible in 2027.
🇺🇸 United States · Georgia Medical ✓
Georgia lets registered patients buy cannabis flower for vaporization
Georgia widened its medical programme beyond low-THC oil to tinctures, patches, capsules and other approved products, including flower for vaporization. Registered patients and caregivers may possess up to 12,000 mg THC in labelled pharmaceutical packaging, with a 1,200 mg limit per package; smoking remains prohibited. The law took effect on 1 July after the governor signed it on 12 May. Vaporization remains prohibited for patients aged 21 or younger.
🇦🇷 Argentina Medical ✓
Argentina publishes a licence for medicinal cannabis seeds and cuttings
ARICCAME Resolution 41/2026, adopted on 26 June and published on 30 June, opens a special adaptation licence for seeds, seedlings and cuttings of cannabis for medicinal use. The window runs until 1 March 2027. The recitals tie it to people and companies that already held authorisations from the health ministry, the seed institute or the agricultural health service. Selling flowers, or making derivatives, is outside the licence, and any flowers that appear while plants are multiplied for propagation cannot be sold. The resolution takes effect on the tenth administrative working day after publication.
🇺🇸 United States · Alabama Medical ✓
Alabama opens its first medical cannabis dispensary
Registered Alabama patients could buy licensed medical cannabis when Callie’s Apothecary opened in Montgomery on 4 June. Patients need Alabama residency, a qualifying condition, a certified physician’s recommendation and a registry card; the approved products exclude raw plant material and products that can be smoked or vaped. The commission later listed openings in Talladega on 28 August and Athens on 14 September.
🇺🇸 United States Medical ✓ Article
The US moves state-licensed medical cannabis to Schedule III
A DEA final rule, announced by the acting attorney general on 23 April and in force on publication, placed cannabis in FDA-approved medicines and cannabis held under a state medical licence in Schedule III. It relied on treaty obligations, which let it skip the usual comment period. Unlicensed and adult-use cannabis stayed in Schedule I, and a hearing on moving all cannabis opened on 29 June.
🇨🇦 Canada Medical ✓
Canada lowers veterans' medical cannabis reimbursement ceiling
Veterans Affairs Canada reduced its maximum reimbursement from C$8.50 to C$6 per dried gram or equivalent for products ordered on or after 1 April. Existing authorised quantities and eligible product forms remained unchanged; patients buying above the ceiling pay the difference. This is a change to a specific federal benefit, not a general cannabis price cap.
🇵🇦 Panama Medical ✓
Panama's first medical cannabis pharmacy opens
The health ministry confirmed that seven licences to sell cannabis-derived products had been issued. All products are imported during a two-year transition.
🇩🇰 Denmark Medical ✓
Denmark makes its medical cannabis scheme permanent
The prescription scheme that began as a four-year trial in 2018 became permanent. Doctors may continue prescribing the scheme's cannabis products, pharmacies dispense them, and the licensed cultivation and production framework continues.
202514 entries2 score changes
🇧🇦 Bosnia and Herzegovina Medical ✓ Article
Bosnia and Herzegovina approves cannabis-based medicines
The Council of Ministers unanimously moved cannabis, its resin, extracts and tinctures from the table of prohibited substances to the table of substances under strict control, so that cannabis-based medicines can be prescribed. Growing cannabis for medicine stays prohibited. Prescribing depends on rulebooks that had still not been amended in July 2026, so no patient had been treated and the score has not moved.
🇵🇭 Philippines Medical ✓
The Philippines updates its compassionate-permit rules
Administrative Order No. 2025-0024, guidelines for availing a compassionate special permit for the restricted use of covered pharmaceutical products and medical devices for human use, took effect on 10 December 2025. The order updates the general named-patient route rather than creating a medical-cannabis programme; the health department says a permit can cover the use and importation of a cannabis-based medicine for an individual patient.
🇧🇼 Botswana Medical ✓ Article
Botswana legalises cannabis under licence
The Cannabis Act allows cannabis for medical, scientific, research and industrial purposes within a licensing system. Regulations followed in 2026. Recreational use stayed illegal.
1112+1 point
🇪🇸 Spain Medical ✓
Spain lets hospital pharmacies prepare a cannabis solution
Royal Decree 903/2025, signed on 7 October and in force on 10 October, the day after the official gazette published it, let hospital specialists prescribe a standardised cannabis preparation when authorised medicines have not worked. Hospital pharmacies make it up and hand it out. Ordinary pharmacies were left for a possible later rule.
🇱🇧 Lebanon Medical ✓ Article
Lebanon finally appoints its cannabis regulator
Five years after Law 178 legalised growing cannabis for medical and industrial use, the Council of Ministers formed the Cannabis Regulatory Authority that the law required. It is to manage and issue cultivation licences.
🇺🇬 Uganda Medical ✓
Uganda grants an experimental growing licence
The government licensed one company to grow, process and export medicinal cannabis in Nakasongola and Luweero districts under police supervision.
🇧🇧 Barbados Medical ✓
Barbados opens its first medicinal dispensary
Island Therapeutics became the first, and so far only, licensed medicinal cannabis dispensary, more than five years after the industry law was passed.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Medical ✓
Ukraine issues its first permit to import medical cannabis
The State Service for Medicinal Products and Drug Control granted the first permit to import a medical cannabis substance, registered in Ukraine and entered in the State Register of Medicines.
🇱🇻 Latvia Medical ✓
A Latvian governing party decides to push for medical cannabis
The board of the Progressives resolved to seek a regulation letting doctors prescribe medicines containing cannabis, as capsules, extracts and tablets, and to take it to their coalition partners. Patients, the party said, now have to buy or import such products illegally. The chief of the State Police said he opposed legalising marijuana but would not object to medical use if experts agreed on it.
🇨🇿 Czechia Medical ✓ Article
Czechia lets general practitioners prescribe medical cannabis
General practitioners became eligible to prescribe medical cannabis for chronic intractable pain. A prescription could also cover up to three months of treatment instead of one, while the existing monthly quantity limits remained in place.
202413 entries2 score changes
🇩🇰 Denmark Medical ✓
Denmark agrees to make its medical cannabis trial permanent
The government and opposition parties agreed that the prescription trial begun on 1 January 2018, extended in 2021 and due to end in 2025, would become permanent from 2026. It keeps its focus on multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury, cancer and chronic pain, with better guidance for doctors; the health ministry's evaluation had found no new evidence strengthening the medical case.
🇵🇱 Poland Medical ✓
Poland restricts online prescriptions for medical cannabis
A health ministry rule first aimed at opioid prescribing was extended to cannabis: specialist clinics may issue a prescription only after examining the patient in person, though family doctors can still prescribe remotely. Prescriptions had peaked in October 2024 and fell by more than half by the end of the year, before growing again in 2025.
🇵🇫 French Polynesia Medical ✓
French Polynesia passes a law on hemp and cannabis medicines
Adopted on 9 July 2024 by 41 votes with 16 abstentions and promulgated on 23 August as loi du pays no. 2024-19, the law regulates growing cannabis without intoxicating properties and medicines containing cannabis or cannabinoids, starting with a small pilot. Recreational use was left out.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Medical ✓ Article
Ukraine legalises medical cannabis
The medical-cannabis framework took effect, allowing licensed cultivation and providing for registered or pharmacy-compounded medicines on electronic prescription. The Ministry of Health says prescribing depends on medicines being imported and pharmacies becoming ready.
2223+1 point
🇵🇭 Philippines Medical ✓
The Philippine House passes a medical-cannabis bill
The House approved the Access to Medical Cannabis Bill on its third and final reading by 177 votes to nine, with nine abstentions. The Senate did not complete its counterpart before the 19th Congress ended, so the proposal lapsed.
🇷🇴 Romania Medical ✓
Romanian prosecutors charge a couple carrying prescribed cannabis
A Romanian couple living in Britain were held for hours at Bucharest airport, charged with importing drugs and had their cannabis seized despite their medical papers. The Bucharest Court of Appeal later overturned the indictment and the seizure. The government had said that cannabis prescribed by doctors elsewhere in the European Union would be accepted.
🇮🇲 Isle of Man Medical ✓
Any Isle of Man pharmacy may now apply to dispense medical cannabis
After a year-long pilot at a single Onchan pharmacy, used by more than 650 patients, the Isle of Man opened licences to all registered pharmacies wishing to dispense private prescriptions for cannabis-based medicines, and let private clinics register to prescribe on the island.
1213+1 point
🇲🇼 Malawi Medical ✓
Malawi allows licensed growing of its local chamba
Parliament passed the Cannabis Regulation (Amendment) Bill on 28 March 2024 to facilitate regulation of a locally produced variety of cannabis. MP Peter Dimba presented it. The Leader of the House said that growing chamba without a licence or being found in possession of it remains an offence, and that passing the Bill does not legalise smoking. Presidential assent was not confirmed in the sources read.
🇮🇩 Indonesia Medical ✓
Indonesia's Constitutional Court again rejects medical cannabis
In a second case brought by parents of a child with cerebral palsy, the court kept the ban on using Class I narcotics for therapy. It repeated its call for the government to conduct medical cannabis research, noting that no comprehensive Indonesian study had followed its 2022 ruling.
🇮🇱 Israel Medical ✓
Israel moves medical cannabis from licences to prescriptions
A Health Ministry reform, delayed from 2023 by the war, let many more doctors prescribe cannabis like other medicines in place of personal licences issued by a few approved doctors. For most conditions patients no longer had to try conventional drugs first. More than 137,000 people held licences at the time, up from about 30,000 in early 2019.
202316 entries1 score change
🇺🇦 Ukraine Medical ✓
Ukraine's parliament adopts the medical cannabis law
Parliament adopted Law 3528-IX. President Zelenskyy signed it on 13 February 2024; its medical cannabis framework was to enter into operation six months after the law took effect.
🇯🇵 Japan Medical ✓
Japan passes a law to allow cannabis medicines and punish use
The House of Councillors passed amendments that open the way for cannabis-derived medicines while making non-medical consumption a crime. The changes took effect a year later.
🇬🇮 Gibraltar Medical ✓
Gibraltar announces trained cannabis doctors and a supply agreement
GHA doctors had completed the necessary training and the government had reached an agreement with Cantourage UK, subject to final detail, to enable cannabis prescribing for eligible patients. The September 2023 announcement followed the 2019 rules requiring trained public doctors and specifically approved products. Health minister John Cortes said the government had been working to make these medicines available for some time.
🇵🇪 Peru Medical ✓
Peru's association-cultivation rules take effect
Supreme Decree 004-2023-SA implemented the patient-association licence and regulated cultivation from seed or seedling, licensed seed supply, security, production plans and delivery to member patients.
🇬🇭 Ghana Medical ✓
Ghana restores licences for industrial and medical cannabis
Parliament passed again the provision, struck down by the Supreme Court the year before, that allows low-THC cannabis to be grown under licence.
🇦🇱 Albania Medical ✓
Albania legalises medical cannabis cultivation
Parliament allowed cannabis to be grown under licence for medical and industrial purposes, in a country long known for illegal production.
🇺🇦 Ukraine Medical ✓
Ukraine's medical cannabis bill passes its first reading
A week after the health ministry gave its support, the bill passed with 268 votes. It was adopted in December, signed by the president on 13 February 2024 and took effect that August.
🇹🇷 Türkiye Medical ✓
Turkey allows hemp to be grown for flowers and leaves under the state grain board
Law 7442 rewrote the first paragraph of Article 23 of the narcotics law. Alongside fibre, seed and stalk, hemp may now be grown with the agriculture ministry's permission for flowers and leaves to make active ingredients for medicines. That growing is done by the Soil Products Office, the state grain board, or by people and companies it engages under its control, within a quota the President may set. A law of July 2025 widened the purpose to medical, health, personal care and supplement products.
🇸🇲 San Marino Medical ✓
San Marino sets the licensing rules for medical cannabis businesses
Delegated Decree No. 53 of 21 March 2023 ratified, with amendments voted by the Great and General Council on 15 and 16 March, the decree of 30 December 2022 on authorisations to cultivate, process and trade cannabis, semi-finished products, flowers and cannabis- derived medicines under the 2021 medical cannabis law. Companies apply to the San Marino Cannabis Control Agency (ASCC) with the cadastral details of the site, a cultivation manual following EU good agricultural practice, staff lists and a security plan approved by the Gendarmerie command.
202221 entries4 score changes
🇱🇦 Laos Medical ✓
Laos opens a licensed route for low-THC hemp medicines
Companies could seek approval to grow, process and sell low-THC hemp under a health ministry decision issued on 28 December 2022. The decision specified a thirty-day transition after signing. Its permissions covered prescribed dried hemp flower and low-THC medicines, alongside registered consumer products; the narcotics law and Penal Code still awaited alignment.
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓
Anvisa lets a university grow cannabis for research
The health regulator Anvisa unanimously authorised the Brain Institute of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte to import, store and germinate cannabis seeds and to grow and process the plants for research on treatments for drug-resistant epilepsy in animal models. Ribeiro, a former director of the institute, calls it the first Brazilian institution to research the plant legally without workarounds.
🇮🇲 Isle of Man Medical ✓ Article
Isle of Man opens a local pharmacy pilot for medical cannabis prescriptions
A DHSC announcement set 1 December as the opening of the island's first medicinal cannabis dispensing service at Karsons Pharmacy in Onchan. The pilot accepted private prescriptions, with an initial estimated seven to ten working days for medicines to arrive after receipt of a prescription. It was licensed for a minimum of twelve months to gather evidence on need and demand; the products were not available on NHS prescription.
1112+1 point
🇨🇩 DR Congo Medical ✓
DR Congo specifies controls for medical and scientific cannabis
A ministerial order revised the 2021 narcotics framework and set cannabis-specific cultivation, production, import and export controls. Medical cultivation requires authorisation and is subject to a stated 0.2% THC ceiling; scientific cultivation has no THC ceiling under article 100. Recreational activities remain prohibited. The order takes effect on signature; its existence does not establish operating patient access.
🇲🇺 Mauritius Medical ✓ Article
Mauritius allows medical cannabis and diverts users to treatment
Amendments to the Dangerous Drugs Act passed in November 2022 let a Medicinal Cannabis Therapeutic Committee in each regional hospital approve medicinal cannabis patient by patient. They also created a Drug Users Administrative Panel, to which people caught with drugs for personal use can be referred for rehabilitation in place of prosecution. The changes had not yet been proclaimed in January 2023.
69+3 points
🇵🇦 Panama Medical ✓
Panama issues its medical cannabis regulations
The regulations implementing Law 242 set up a government body to oversee cultivation, production and distribution and limited the first manufacturing licences.
🇵🇾 Paraguay Medical ✓
Paraguay lifts the cap on medical cannabis licences
Decree 7761 removed the limit of thirteen licences and the rule that medical cannabis could be grown only in the Central department. The regulator had reported that very few products were reaching patients with refractory epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. A licence requires a pharmaceutical laboratory in Paraguay and runs for five years.
🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Medical ✓
A cannabis consumption lounge opens in Saint Vincent
The Greenhouse Café opened at a beach club with a doctor on site. Visitors get a prescription there and a one-year cannabis card from the Medicinal Cannabis Authority, then may buy from the dispensary and consume on the premises.
🇵🇱 Poland Medical ✓
Poland allows state institutes to grow medical cannabis
An amendment passed on 24 March 2022 let research institutes supervised by the agriculture minister grow cannabis and harvest herb and resin as pharmaceutical raw material, under a permit from the Chief Pharmaceutical Inspector valid for up to five years and with each plant tracked. Nobody else may grow it. The same act defined fibre hemp as plants with no more than 0.3% of THC and THCA together.
🇻🇺 Vanuatu Medical ✓ Article
Vanuatu starts licensing medical cannabis for export and industrial hemp
A new licensing law took effect on 17 January 2022, allowing licensed medical-cannabis cultivation for export and industrial-hemp production. The original Act required applicants to show ten years’ relevant experience, VT10 million in a local bank, an agricultural lease and an export market or buyer; licences ran for ten years. Hemp was defined at no more than 0.3% delta-9 THC on a dry-weight basis, and implementing rules followed in February 2023.
🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Medical ✓
Saint Vincent approves its first cannabis export
The government approved its first export certificate, for a shipment to Germany by Caribbean Cannabis Company, after Germany's medicines institute issued an import certificate. Saint Vincent was the first Eastern Caribbean state allowed to export medicinal cannabis.
🇨🇿 Czechia Medical ✓ Article
Czechia opens medical cultivation to multiple licensees
Czechia replaced the system in which a single tendered supplier grew for the state agency. Any applicant meeting the statutory conditions could seek a cultivation licence and a permit to handle controlled substances, then supply Czech pharmacies or export with permission.
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Medical ✓ Article
Zimbabwe opens applications for hemp-based CBD medicines
The medicines regulator began accepting applications to register hemp-based CBD products as complementary medicines in the second quarter of 2022. A July circular explained the requirements to licensed producers, manufacturers, traders and retail pharmacists. The regulator’s annual report records two manufacturing applications and one manufacturer licensed after inspections in early 2023.
🇲🇦 Morocco Medical ✓
Morocco sets up its cannabis regulator
The National Agency for the Regulation of Cannabis-related Activities was created to license legal growing for medical, cosmetic and industrial use. It began taking applications in January 2023, and legal exports to Europe started in 2024.
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓
Brazil's Superior Court of Justice allows medical home growing
The sixth panel of the Superior Court of Justice unanimously authorised three people to grow cannabis at home for therapeutic purposes. The decision became guidance for courts across the country and led to a large increase in court orders for domestic cultivation, though only for those able to go to court.
202117 entries4 score changes
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico Medical ✓ Article
Puerto Rico protects registered cannabis patients against job discrimination
Registered medical-cannabis patients who identify themselves to an employer became a protected group in hiring, dismissal and other employment decisions. Employers could still establish exceptions for real safety risks, interference with essential duties, threatened federal permissions or funding, or unauthorised use or possession at work. The amendment filled an employment-protection gap left by the 2017 medical-cannabis law.
🇵🇪 Peru Medical ✓
Peru authorises patient-association cultivation
Law 31312 created a licence for associations of two or more registered patients, their designated supporters or legal representatives to cultivate cannabis and process it exclusively for their qualified members.
🇬🇬 Guernsey Medical ✓
Guernsey agrees a medicinal cannabis cultivation arrangement with the UK
A memorandum with the UK Home Office addressed authorisations to cultivate medicinal cannabis and compliance with the Single Convention. Jersey's subsequent scrutiny report records the July agreement and describes the Guernsey cannabis agency's interdepartmental membership. The month is verified from that report; an exact signing date and the memorandum's original text have not been established here.
🇲🇦 Morocco Medical ✓ Article
Morocco legalises cannabis for medical and industrial use
Law 13-21, promulgated by dahir on 14 July 2021, created a state agency that authorises growing, processing and sale for medical, pharmaceutical and industrial purposes, in provinces listed by decree. Growers must be Moroccan adults in a cooperative and deliver the whole harvest. Unlicensed activity stays under the 1974 drug law.
1213+1 point
🇷🇼 Rwanda Medical ✓ Article
Rwanda licenses medical cannabis and sets prescription rules
Rwanda opened a licensing system for growing, processing, researching, importing and exporting cannabis for medical or research purposes on 28 June 2021. Medical use required a prescription from a doctor with written health-ministry authority, and operators had to meet detailed security and tracking rules. The order used powers in the 2012 drug-control law; licences lasted five years and could be renewed.
🇸🇲 San Marino Medical ✓
San Marino licenses growing cannabis for medicines
Law 113, approved by the Council on 18 June, allows cannabis seeds and plants to be grown in technological greenhouses and processed into medicines for medicinal or therapeutic use only. Growers, processors and traders need an authorisation from the health authority, which acts as the national cannabis control agency.
🇬🇷 Greece Medical ✓
Greece ends the state monopoly on selling medical cannabis products
Law 4801/2021 amended the 2013 drug law. It repealed the state's monopoly on the sale of finished cannabis products, so that they can be sold directly to pharmacies, wholesalers, clinics and public hospitals; made the medicines agency EOF the sole licensing body; and allowed exports of finished products and of dried flower in packs of up to 30 g. Products for the Greek market still need EOF's approval before they can be prescribed.
🇿🇲 Zambia Medical ✓
Zambia enacts its Cannabis Act and Industrial Hemp Act
Parliament published both Acts on 20 May 2021. Each comes into operation only on a date the Minister appoints. The Cannabis Act would let the medicines regulator license cultivation, manufacture, storage, distribution, import and export for medicinal, scientific or research purposes. The hemp Act covers plants of not more than 0.3% THC. Neither Act was in force on the day it was published.
🇵🇪 Peru Medical ✓
Peru licenses a specialist medical-cannabis pharmacy
Lima Centro's health authority granted Cannabis & Co. Peru a licence to sell registered and pharmacy-compounded cannabis medicines. The licence recorded operations from 19 April 2021.
🇫🇷 France Medical ✓ Article
France begins a medical cannabis experiment
A trial for up to 3,000 patients with conditions such as severe epilepsy and cancer pain began, the first legal medical use in France. It has been extended several times without becoming permanent.
1314+1 point
🇨🇾 Cyprus Medical ✓ Article
Cyprus receives imported cannabis oils for approved patients
Panaxia announced its first medical-cannabis delivery to Cyprus after securing an order and import permits from the government. The agreement covered two oil concentrations, with government distribution through pharmacies for approved patients. The shipment followed the named-patient oil route and the 2019 medical-cannabis regulations.
🇮🇲 Isle of Man Medical ✓ Article
Isle of Man cannabis licensing regulations take effect
The Misuse of Drugs (Cannabis) Regulations 2020 allowed the Gambling Supervision Commission to license cultivation and specified controlled-drug activities, subject to licence terms and conditions. They were made on 30 December 2020, approved by Tynwald on 19 January 2021 and commenced the following day. This created a licensing framework rather than a general cultivation exemption or proof that a producer had begun operating.
🇲🇽 Mexico Medical ✓ Article
Mexico issues its medical cannabis regulation
The regulation needed to apply the 2017 reform was published in the official gazette, after the Supreme Court ordered it in August 2019. It set up growing permits for research and for making medicines, issued by the agricultural health service, and requires doctors to get authorisation from the health regulator and use special coded prescriptions.
1718+1 point
202013 entries5 score changes
🇯🇪 Jersey Medical ✓
Jersey's first local medical cannabis clinic begins prescribing
The Chief Pharmacist's evidence to a later scrutiny review dates the first local clinic to November 2020. Before then, following the January 2019 law change, Jersey patients' prescriptions had been issued by UK clinics and dispensed by UK pharmacies. This records the start of local prescribing rather than the first legal access to these medicines.
🇦🇷 Argentina Medical ✓ Article
Argentina lets registered patients grow their own
A decree created the REPROCANN registry: with a doctor's indication, a registered person may grow cannabis at home or name a grower or association to do it for them.
2026+6 points
🇬🇬 Guernsey Medical ✓
Guernsey lets islanders import prescribed medical cannabis and GPs prescribe it
Amendments approved by the Committee for Health & Social Care came into force on 28 September. Islanders could now use off-island clinics privately and import prescribed cannabis products under a licensing process, and prescribing was extended from specialists to general practitioners. The patient bears the cost; there is no adult-use source.
1113+2 points
🇵🇾 Paraguay Medical ✓ Article
Paraguay's president vetoes home growing for patients
On 26 August the Chamber of Deputies had given final approval to a bill amending articles 30 and 33 of the drug law: a patient with a medical certificate endorsed by the health ministry could hold cannabis, and grow and process it on premises authorised by the anti-drug secretariat. The president vetoed it on the advice of that secretariat and the health ministry, who said it breached the 1961 Single Convention. On 5 November the Senate voted again for the bill, with 26 votes. In April 2022 it was still waiting in the Chamber of Deputies.
🇱🇧 Lebanon Medical ✓
Lebanon legalises growing cannabis for medicine
Parliament made Lebanon the first Arab country to permit cannabis cultivation, for medical and industrial use and for export. Recreational use stayed illegal.
🇳🇿 New Zealand Medical ✓
New Zealand opens its medicinal cannabis scheme
Doctors may prescribe cannabis products that meet a national quality standard, dispensed by pharmacies. A referendum on full legalisation failed narrowly later the same year.
1820+2 points
🇰🇳 Saint Kitts and Nevis Medical ✓
Saint Kitts and Nevis tables a medicinal cannabis law
The Cannabis Bill 2020 provided for a Medicinal Cannabis Authority to regulate and license the cultivation, supply, possession, production and use of medicinal cannabis. It became the Cannabis Act, No. 8 of 2020, which a 2023 bill proposed to amend.
🇲🇼 Malawi Medical ✓
Malawi legalises cannabis for medicine and industry
Parliament allowed cannabis to be grown and processed under licence for medical and industrial use, as an alternative to tobacco. Recreational use stayed illegal.
🇺🇬 Uganda Medical ✓
Uganda approves cannabis exports for medicine
The health ministry approved exports of medicinal cannabis, requiring exporters to hold at least $1 million in capital and a $5 million reserve.
🇨🇿 Czechia Medical ✓ Article
Czech health insurers start paying for medical cannabis
Patients had been paying the full price since 2013, which kept the programme tiny. Insurers now cover 90% of the cost for up to 30 g a month, and the number of patients grew quickly.
201928 entries9 score changes
🇦🇼 Aruba Medical ✓ Article
Aruba recognises CBD medicines and exempts low-THC CBD from narcotics rules
Aruba designated cannabidiol and its preparations as medicines and excluded CBD preparations with no more than 0.2% THC from a narcotics designation. The minister cited growing use of cannabis preparations for health reasons and the need to protect consumers. A companion rule exempted specified external-use products, supplements, herbs and foods from medicinal classification, but was withdrawn the following month.
🇿🇲 Zambia Medical ✓
Zambia legalises cannabis for export and medicine
The cabinet approved growing cannabis under licence for export and medical purposes only.
🇭🇰 Hong Kong Medical ✓
Hong Kong makes CBD medicines prescription-only
CBD pharmaceutical products came under prescription-only medicine controls, with supply through authorised practitioners or a pharmacy dispensing a prescription. The government’s later legislative brief recorded 13 December 2019 as the start date and said no CBD pharmaceutical product had been registered in Hong Kong by October 2022.
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓ Article
Brazil allows cannabis products in pharmacies
The health regulator approved rules for selling cannabis-based products in pharmacies on prescription. Growing the plant in Brazil stayed prohibited, so everything was imported.
1415+1 point
🇸🇬 Singapore Medical ✓
Singapore approves its first cannabinoid medicine
Authorities allowed a girl with treatment-resistant epilepsy to receive a cannabis-derived pharmaceutical after the available registered treatments had failed. Approval was exceptional and case by case; raw cannabis and a general medical-cannabis programme remained illegal.
🇧🇧 Barbados Medical ✓ Article
Barbados legalises medical and sacramental cannabis
Two laws set up a licensed medical cannabis industry and allowed Rastafari to use cannabis as a sacrament at their places of worship.
1112+1 point
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓
England's medicines watchdog approves two cannabis-based medicines
A year after specialist doctors were allowed to prescribe cannabis-based medicines, NICE changed its guidelines to allow two of them, for two forms of epilepsy and for multiple sclerosis. It did not allow them for other conditions such as chronic pain, which some patients' groups called a missed opportunity.
🇲🇹 Malta Medical ✓
Over 400 Maltese patients use medical cannabis
The health minister, Chris Fearne, said more than 400 people were using medical cannabis under the 2018 law and that 32 doctors had recommended it, which he called a small number. He called for more research to build doctors' confidence.
🇪🇪 Estonia Medical ✓
Epidyolex gains authorisation in Estonia
The European Commission authorised the prescription cannabidiol medicine Epidyolex throughout the EU. Estonia also permits doctors to request unauthorised cannabinoid medicines or standardised cannabis for individual patients.
1920+1 point
🇪🇨 Ecuador Medical ✓
Ecuador legalises medical cannabis and hemp
A reform of the criminal code took cannabis with less than 1% THC out of the list of controlled substances and allowed cannabis medicines on prescription.
2223+1 point
🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Medical ✓
The Faroese pharmacy service orders cannabis flower for a patient
The Faroese Pharmacy Service placed an order for cannabis buds from a Dutch supplier after a doctor requested them. Existing cannabis drops were already prescribed to 61 patients, but this order concerned flower. The order followed the April 2019 opening of the medical trial scheme, which the Chief Medical Officer later confirmed.
🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Medical ✓
Saint Vincent issues its first cannabis licences
The Medicinal Cannabis Authority approved more than 30 licences: eight farmers' cooperatives with over 100 traditional growers between them, individual traditional growers, three other local farmers and ten companies.
🇮🇪 Ireland Medical ✓ Article
Ireland starts its Medical Cannabis Access Programme
A five-year pilot allows consultants to prescribe approved cannabis products for three conditions where other treatment has failed.
1112+1 point
🇬🇬 Guernsey Medical ✓
Guernsey lets Bailiwick specialists prescribe medicinal herbal cannabis
The Committee for Health & Social Care moved pharmaceutical-standard medicinal herbal cannabis from Schedule 1 to Schedule 2 of the Misuse of Drugs (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Ordinance, 1997, so that authorised specialists based in the Bailiwick could prescribe it in defined circumstances. In practice the route went unused: the Committee later said practical barriers had to be removed before islanders could obtain prescribed cannabis.
🇸🇨 Seychelles Medical ✓ Article
Seychelles court orders medical drug rules after a mother’s access case
Ralph Volcere won an order giving ministers 24 months to issue medical and scientific drug regulations after seeking cannabis access for his mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease. The court found a duty to write rules under the 2016 law and left their content to ministers, with effect for the future. In 2020 the government issued a permit system for tightly defined CBD medicines.
🇱🇹 Lithuania Medical ✓
Lithuania allows cannabis-based medicines
A law permitted doctors to prescribe registered medicines made from cannabis. Flower and home growing stayed illegal.
1112+1 point
🇭🇷 Croatia Medical ✓
Croatia allows domestic production of medical cannabis
An amendment in force from 25 April 2019 let cannabis be grown and produced for medical purposes by companies holding a medicines-manufacturing licence, with approval from the health ministry and the medicines agency. It also defined industrial hemp as EU-listed varieties with no more than 0.2% THC and made growers register before sowing.
🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Medical ✓ Article
Faroese doctors can prescribe cannabis through a medical trial scheme
Doctors in the Faroe Islands gained access to a medical-cannabis trial scheme in April 2019, as confirmed by the Chief Medical Officer and Pharmacy Service. Joint prescribing guidance recommends trying conventional medicines first, documenting the reason for treatment and monitoring the patient; it identifies pain, multiple sclerosis, spinal-cord injury and chemotherapy-related nausea among the treatment areas. The wider access followed parliamentary pressure, and by July the pharmacy service had ordered cannabis flower from the Netherlands.
🇪🇹 Ethiopia Medical ✓
Ethiopia refuses a medical cannabis farm after a public outcry
Africana Cannabis Holding, a venture of Ethiopian and Canadian investors, proposed a farm and factory in Dembecha, in the Amhara region, to grow cannabis for medicine and export. When the local administration posted news of a meeting with residents, protests spread online. The health minister, Amir Aman, said growing cannabis for medical purposes had neither been recognised nor approved and that such requests had been and would be denied; the head of the Investment Commission said no permit to grow cannabis in Ethiopia would be issued.
🇨🇾 Cyprus Medical ✓ Article
Cyprus creates licences for medical cannabis farms and pharmacy supply
New regulations created a licensed route for growing, processing and supplying medical cannabis, with an initial opening for three producers. They also set pharmacy-preparation and prescription rules, including separate approval for patients under eighteen. The framework followed the earlier cannabis-oil route for cancer patients; imported oils were documented reaching the government in March 2021.
🇭🇷 Croatia Medical ✓ Article
Croatia's president pardons a patient jailed for growing cannabis
Four weeks after a court confirmed two years in prison for Huanito Luksetić, who has multiple sclerosis and had grown cannabis for oil, President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović signed a full pardon from serving the sentence. She had announced on Twitter that she would do so if he asked. The decision was published in the official gazette on 1 March and the court stopped the enforcement of the sentence.
🇹🇭 Thailand Medical ✓ Article
Thailand legalises medical cannabis
Thailand became the first country in South-East Asia to allow cannabis for medical use and research. Recreational possession stayed a narcotics offence for three more years.
67+1 point
🇮🇱 Israel Medical ✓
Israel approves exports of medical cannabis
The government approved the export of medical cannabis; shares of eight cannabis companies rose sharply on the Tel Aviv exchange. From 1 April 2019 about 100 specially trained doctors could also write prescriptions to be filled at the Super-Pharm pharmacy chain.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Medical ✓ Article
US Virgin Islands approve medical cannabis for registered patients
Governor Albert Bryan Jr. signed the medical cannabis law sponsored by Positive T.A. Nelson, after final legislative approval in December. The programme provided practitioner certification, patient cards, licensed businesses and home cultivation for residents whose cards authorised it. Its preamble cited the 2014 vote supporting medical-cannabis legislation; the broader Cannabis Use Act replaced the programme in 2023.
🇯🇪 Jersey Medical ✓ Article
Jersey brings its wider medical cannabis prescribing rules into force
The No. 7 Order made in December 2018 placed qualifying cannabis-related medicinal products within Schedule 2. The exemption required good manufacturing practice and manufacturer certification; smoking the products remained prohibited. Article 4 set commencement on 1 January 2019, with Article 2 following immediately after the other provisions. This was a controlled medicines route, not general cannabis legalisation.
🇱🇮 Liechtenstein Medical ✓
Liechtenstein authorises cannabis medicines
Marketing authorisation was given to the cannabis-based medicines Epidyolex and Sativex.
1314+1 point
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓
Brazil's medical cannabis associations form a national federation
Dozens of patients' associations, which had grown up to supply cannabis oil in the absence of regulated access, formed the National Federation for Therapeutic Cannabis (FACT). By then, according to the Rede Reforma lawyers' collective, more than 140,000 patients were supplied by associations or by individuals with court orders.
201823 entries9 score changes
🇬🇺 Guam Medical ✓
Guam protects permitted medical growers from arrest and forfeiture
Guam expressly extended medical-cannabis protections to patients and caregivers using the home-growing permits introduced in October. The amendment counted permitted plants separately from the patient’s allowable cannabis amount and protected qualifying conduct from arrest, prosecution and property forfeiture. Sponsored by Dennis Rodriguez Jr. and Louise Muña, it also protected custody and visitation rights unless the conduct endangered a child.
🇸🇷 Suriname Medical ✓
Suriname sets up a committee to study medical cannabis
A committee was appointed in 2018 to look into the medical use of cannabis. Eight years earlier Chan Santokhi, then chair of the inter-American drug commission, had argued for keeping and enforcing the ban.
🇵🇱 Poland Medical ✓ Article
The first medical cannabis reaches Polish pharmacies
More than a year after the law took effect, the first registered product went on sale: dried flower with about 19% THC from Spectrum Cannabis, part of Canada's Canopy Growth, which had applied for registration in June 2018. It was sold on prescription in three pharmacies, in Poznań, Konin and Wrocław, at about 60 to 65 zloty a gram. The first delivery was seven kilograms; it served about 300 patients and was gone within days.
1214+2 points
🇨🇩 DR Congo Medical ✓
DR Congo writes a medical exception into its narcotics law
DR Congo promulgated a public-health law allowing narcotics cultivation, production, possession and sale for medical and scientific purposes, subject to authorisation. The law tasked the health minister with setting permission conditions and required records and access for inspections. It specified commencement three months after promulgation; cannabis licensing conditions followed through the 2021 ministerial order.
🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Medical ✓
Saint Vincent legalises a medical cannabis industry
Parliament passed laws licensing cultivation for medical use and export, with an amnesty meant to bring the island's traditional growers into the legal system.
🇰🇷 South Korea Medical ✓
South Korea legalises medical cannabis
The National Assembly allowed a small number of cannabis-derived medicines to be imported for patients with rare diseases, through a state agency. It was the first country in East Asia to do so.
23+1 point
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓ Article
The United Kingdom allows medical cannabis
Specialist doctors may prescribe cannabis-based medicines. In practice almost all prescriptions come from private clinics, as the health service funds very few. Recreational law did not change.
1415+1 point
🇮🇲 Isle of Man Medical ✓
Medical cannabis rescheduling also takes effect in the Isle of Man
The DHSC's subsequent consultation explained that the UK instrument rescheduling cannabis-based medicinal products applied in the Isle of Man through earlier Manx legislation. This permitted medical use in limited circumstances, but did not itself establish a local pharmacy dispensing service. The consultation separately sought views on the island's future approach.
🇿🇼 Zimbabwe Medical ✓ Article
Zimbabwe lets licensed producers grow cannabis for medicine and research
Licensed producers could grow and process cannabis for medicinal and scientific purposes under five-year licences. Applications required site plans, security clearances and production records, with a published US$50,000 production-licence application fee. The medicines regulator later reported that the first licence was issued in 2019 and that production was directed towards exports, with local use limited to research.
🇮🇱 Israel Medical ✓
Israeli pharmacies begin selling cannabis oil
Under a pilot programme pharmacies were permitted to dispense cannabis oil to licensed patients. In January 2020 imports were allowed from countries with comparable rules, and in 2022 Israel brought in more than 33,000 kilograms, the largest importer of medical cannabis in the world.
🇲🇹 Malta Medical ✓ Article
Malta legalises medical cannabis
An amendment to the Drug Dependence Act, passed on 26 March, let doctors prescribe cannabis for chronic pain, spasticity in multiple sclerosis and the side effects of chemotherapy, to patients holding a control card from the Superintendent of Public Health; pharmacies dispense non-smoked forms. A second law the same year licensed production for medicine, research and export.
2122+1 point
🇮🇸 Iceland Medical ✓
Iceland confirms prescription access to Sativex
The Icelandic Medicines Agency confirmed that Sativex had a marketing authorisation and could be bought at a pharmacy on a prescription from a neurologist. It remains a narrow route for multiple-sclerosis spasticity rather than a herbal-cannabis programme.
1617+1 point
🇬🇷 Greece Medical ✓
Greece legalises medical cannabis
Parliament allowed the cultivation, production and prescription of medical cannabis. Licences for producers came quickly; finished products reached patients only years later.
1314+1 point
🇭🇷 Croatia Medical ✓
Croatian pharmacies run out of cannabis medicine, and nobody reorders
Two imports of cannabis oil, 1,200 bottles each, had been approved in 2016, after a Canadian firm briefly supplied capsules; in 2017 only fifteen bottles of Sativex came in. When the last stock expired in March 2018 the state institute that imported the drops placed no new order, for lack of demand. A month's treatment cost 2,000 to 3,000 kuna, the health fund paid nothing, and at one Zagreb hospital only two multiple sclerosis patients had asked for a prescription in 2017. In 2025 a market survey found no cannabis medicine on sale in the country.
🇰🇷 South Korea Medical ✓
A Korean lawmaker proposes allowing cannabis medicines
Shin Chang-hyun introduced a bill to permit the medical use of cannabis with the approval of the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. In July the ministry backed the change and said it would allow Epidiolex, Marinol and Sativex. The National Assembly passed it on 23 November.
🇩🇰 Denmark Medical ✓ Article
Denmark starts a medical cannabis pilot
A four-year trial let any doctor prescribe cannabis products that were not approved as medicines. It was later extended and then made permanent.
1820+2 points
🇵🇾 Paraguay Medical ✓
Paraguay caps medical cannabis at thirteen licences
Decree 9303 of 2018, the regulation of the medical cannabis law, allowed the health regulator to issue no more than thirteen licences to produce, process and sell medical cannabis, and confined growing to the Central department. Licences went to twelve firms, pharmaceutical laboratories required to give at least 2% of their output to the health ministry for free distribution.
🇱🇸 Lesotho Medical ✓
Lesotho issues cannabis regulations
The Drugs of Abuse (Cannabis) Regulations were the latest change to the cannabis law, after the government licensed five producers, several of them soon bought by Canadian and other foreign firms.
201715 entries5 score changes
🇵🇪 Peru Medical ✓ Article
Peru legalises medical cannabis
Law 30681 allowed the informed use, research, import and commercialisation of cannabis and its derivatives exclusively for medicinal and therapeutic purposes, through patient registration and licensed operators.
2021+1 point
🇱🇺 Luxembourg Medical ✓
Luxembourg announces a medical cannabis pilot
The health minister announced a two-year pilot programme for cannabis extracts and cannabinoids. Parliament approved medical cannabis unanimously the following June.
🇵🇱 Poland Medical ✓ Article
Poland legalises medical cannabis from pharmacies
A bill from the Kukiz'15 club, driven by the rapper and MP Piotr Liroy-Marzec, passed the Sejm on 22 June 2017 by 440 votes to 2. Its first draft would have let patients grow their own; that was removed. The law lets cannabis herb, resin and extracts be registered as a pharmaceutical raw material from which pharmacies prepare medicines on a doctor's prescription, with the raw material imported. It took effect on 1 November 2017, but no product was registered for another year.
1112+1 point
🇲🇽 Mexico Medical ✓
Mexico legalises medical cannabis
A reform of the health law allowed medicines containing cannabis. The rules needed to put it into practice were not issued until 2021.
🇬🇷 Greece Medical ✓
Greece makes medical use lawful
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras announced that patients could use cannabis with a doctor's authorisation, after a government decision was published in the official gazette. A committee had been set up to study the question in July 2016.
🇿🇲 Zambia Medical ✓
Zambian ministers disagree over medical cannabis licences
The home affairs minister, Steven Kampyongo, said that growing cannabis for medical use was already legal for anyone holding a licence from the health minister. The health minister, Chitalu Chilufya, then said he had no intention of issuing any. Cabinet approved licensed growing for export and medicine in December 2019.
🇦🇷 Argentina Medical ✓
Argentina passes a medical cannabis law
Law 27.350 set up a national research programme and allowed cannabis oil to be imported for patients. It did not allow growing, which patients' families kept doing illegally until the 2020 registry.
🇩🇪 Germany Medical ✓ Article
Germany legalises medical cannabis
Doctors may prescribe cannabis flower and extracts for serious illness, dispensed by pharmacies and reimbursed by health insurers after approval.
2021+1 point
🇱🇸 Lesotho Medical ✓
Lesotho issues Africa's first medical cannabis licences
Lesotho, where cannabis has long been a major cash crop, became the first country in Africa to license its cultivation for medical use.
🇮🇳 India Medical ✓
India issues its first cannabis research licence
The union government licensed the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research to grow cannabis for research. The same year Gujarat legalised bhang by taking it off its list of intoxicating drugs.
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓
A Brazilian patients' association is authorised to grow cannabis
Abrace Esperança in Paraíba became the first patients' association in Brazil allowed to plant, harvest and process cannabis to supply therapeutic oil to its members. Ribeiro writes that it went on to supply some forty thousand patients. In the same year a federal judge in Rio Grande do Norte allowed a woman with Parkinson's disease and her son to grow six plants.
201612 entries6 score changes
🇵🇷 Puerto Rico Medical ✓
Puerto Rico’s first medical dispensaries begin serving patients
The first two medical-cannabis dispensaries opened after the 2015 executive order, reclassification and subsequent licensing work. Governor Alejandro García Padilla visited one of the businesses and reported 1,953 registered patients and 23 licensed companies across the industry. A later court judgment independently records The Family Dispensary beginning sales to authorised patients on that date, before a dispute over its local use permit.
1114+3 points
🇮🇪 Ireland Medical ✓
Ireland issues its first licence for medical cannabis
The licence was for cannabis oil for a two-year-old boy with Dravet syndrome. The same month a bill by Gino Kenny on cannabis for medicinal use passed its second stage in the Dáil without a vote; a health committee rejected it the following year.
🇳🇴 Norway Medical ✓
Norway has approved one patient for medical cannabis
In principle a small group of seriously ill patients, for whom other medicines had failed, could be given cannabis. In practice, as of this date, a single person in Norway had been approved.
🇰🇾 Cayman Islands Medical ✓ Article
Cayman lets doctors prescribe cannabis extracts and tinctures
Cayman made the use of cannabis extracts and tinctures lawful when prescribed by a locally licensed medical doctor for a patient under that doctor’s care, with the doctor setting the dose. The published proposal created a route through authorised doctors, pharmacists and importers, and the official legislation history records the amendment’s commencement on 18 November 2016. By August 2017, Canadian producer Cronos reported a completed medical-oil shipment to a distributor working with a George Town hospital pharmacy.
1011+1 point
🇹🇷 Türkiye Medical ✓
Turkey allows cannabinoid medicines
Regulations permitted cannabinoid medicines such as Sativex on prescription, and allowed hemp growing in nineteen provinces.
🇸🇲 San Marino Medical ✓
San Marino allows cannabis-based medicines
Following a citizens' initiative, patients can obtain medicines such as Sativex for approved conditions including multiple sclerosis and neuropathic pain, at no cost to residents.
1112+1 point
🇲🇰 North Macedonia Medical ✓
North Macedonia legalises medical cannabis
An amendment allowed cannabis products to be prescribed and licensed companies to grow for medical use and export.
1112+1 point
🇧🇷 Brazil Medical ✓ Article
Brazilian families win the right to grow cannabis for their children
Margarete Brito and Marcos Langenbach, whose daughter Sofia has a severe genetic epilepsy, obtained what Ribeiro calls the first habeas corpus in Brazil to grow marijuana, using high-CBD seedlings donated by growers. The same year the family of Clárian Carvalho, a girl with Dravet syndrome, won a similar order with the help of the Rede Reforma lawyers' collective. Both families went on to found patients' associations, Apepi and Cultive.
🇵🇱 Poland Medical ✓
A Warsaw children's hospital dismisses the doctor treating epilepsy with cannabis
Neurologist Marek Bachański had been treating children with drug-resistant epilepsy with cannabis preparations at the Children's Memorial Health Institute. In July 2015 the hospital suspended the therapy, saying it had not been approved by its bioethics committee, and on 7 August it notified prosecutors; the health ministry called the treatment illegal. He was dismissed in late October. Parents had protested outside the hospital on 7 October demanding his return, and the case became the centre of the campaign for a medical cannabis law.
🇭🇷 Croatia Medical ✓ Article
Croatia legalises medical cannabis
A regulation in force from 15 October let doctors prescribe medicines containing THC for multiple sclerosis, cancer, epilepsy and AIDS: a specialist recommends, the family doctor writes the prescription, for at most 30 days and 0.75 g of THC. The health minister, Siniša Varga, promised products within weeks. A patients' association called it a hollow regulation made for the elections, and a wholesaler expected a month's therapy to cost up to 800 euros.
1920+1 point
🇧🇬 Bulgaria Medical ✓
Bulgaria's drugs council declares there is no need for medical cannabis
In February the National Council on Narcotic Drugs had commissioned two expert reports, on the medical potential of cannabis and on how other European Union countries regulate it. After a change of members it declared at its October meeting that Bulgaria had no need for medical marijuana, and according to a reform group tried to keep the reports from being published.
20149 entries1 score change
🇺🇸 United States Medical ✓
Congress bars federal interference with state medical cannabis
The Rohrabacher–Farr amendment stopped the Justice Department from spending money to block state medical cannabis laws. The same year Alaska, Oregon and Washington DC voted to legalise.
🇮🇹 Italy Medical ✓ Article
Italy gives its army the job of growing medical cannabis
The state's medical cannabis is grown by the army's chemical and pharmaceutical plant on the edge of Florence, which also makes antidotes and orphan drugs; the operation was launched in 2014 and is overseen by the Defence Industries Agency. Its two registered varieties are called FM1 and FM2, for Farmaceutico Militare. Output was 50 kg in 2020 and 300 kg in 2022, against a national need of about 1,500 kg a year; the rest is imported from the Netherlands, Canada, Denmark and Germany.
🇨🇱 Chile Medical ✓
Chile plants its first authorised cannabis
Growers with government permission began planting cannabis at a site in Santiago to produce oil for cancer patients.
🇮🇹 Italy Medical ✓
Italy's Constitutional Court limits what regions can do on cannabinoid medicines
The court struck down the parts of Liguria's law on cannabinoid medicines that dealt with prescribing and production agreements, because those are matters for national medicines rules. It upheld Veneto's plan for pilot production projects, since they still needed national authorisation. Regions could organise access to these medicines, but only within national law.
🇫🇷 France Medical ✓ Article
France allows cannabis-based medicines to be authorised
Decree 2013-473, signed on 5 June and published on 7 June, took effect the next day. It exempted specified operations involving cannabis-containing pharmaceutical specialties with a French or EU marketing authorisation. It opened an authorisation route rather than legalising all therapeutic cannabis or proving products were available.
20123 entries1 score change
🇫🇮 Finland Medical ✓
Finland authorises Sativex
Finland granted marketing authorisation to Sativex, a cannabis-extract mouth spray containing THC and CBD. Neurologists may prescribe it for adults with moderate to severe spasticity caused by multiple sclerosis when other treatment has not worked.
🇦🇹 Austria Medical ✓
Austria opens a narrow prescription-cannabinoid route
Sativex became available in Austria for multiple-sclerosis spasticity. Patients can also receive a small range of other cannabinoid medicines, including pharmacy-compounded dronabinol, while cannabis flower remains unavailable on prescription.
1920+1 point
🇮🇹 Italy Medical ✓
Tuscany organises cannabinoid medicines in its health service
Tuscany passed a regional law so that its health service could provide cannabinoid medicines, supplied through hospital pharmacies. Imports still followed national rules and were allowed only when other medicines had failed or were inadequate. A year later the Constitutional Court struck down parts of a similar Ligurian law for going beyond what a region may decide.
20111 entry1 score change
20101 entry0 score changes
20085 entries0 score changes
🇦🇹 Austria Medical ✓
Austria reserves medicinal cannabis cultivation to AGES or its controlled subsidiary
New section 6a permitted cannabis cultivation for obtaining narcotics to manufacture medicines and for related scientific purposes only by the Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), or a subsidiary in which it held at least 75 percent. Harvested and dried plants or cannabis could be supplied only to licensed pharmaceutical manufacturers and wholesalers. This created an institutional production route, not a patient home-growing entitlement or general access to cannabis flower.
🇺🇸 United States · Michigan Medical ✓
Michigan's voter-approved medical cannabis law takes effect
The Michigan Medical Marihuana Act took effect after the November vote. It provided protections for qualifying medical use and patient or caregiver cultivation, with a registry system and a separate medical-purpose defence. State Police noted that registration rules were still being prepared and that the Act did not itself establish a legal supply mechanism. Federal prohibition remained in place.
🇨🇿 Czechia Medical ✓
Czech Supreme Court requires individual assessment of therapeutic cannabis cultivation
In case 3 Tdo 52/2008, the Supreme Court quashed an appeal decision against a woman growing cannabis for therapeutic preparations and returned the case for reconsideration. It rejected the offence classification used below and found that the specific treatment circumstances could lack the social harmfulness required for a crime. The ruling did not create a general medical-cannabis licence or prevent other production or possession offences from applying in different cases.
🇸🇪 Sweden Medical ✓
A Swedish court jails a multiple sclerosis patient for cannabis
The woman, a first offender, was given an unconditional prison sentence; the court treated her statement that cannabis eased her symptoms as an aggravating circumstance. The medicines agency reported that year that no cannabinoid drug was available in Sweden.
🇨🇦 Canada Medical ✓
Canada's Federal Court strikes down the one-patient limit on designated growers
In Sfetkopoulos, the Federal Court declared paragraph 41(b.1) of the medical-access regulations invalid under section 7 of the Charter. The rule prevented a designated grower from holding more than one production licence. The court set aside refusals of applications naming a common producer and returned them to the minister for reconsideration; it did not abolish medical licensing or legalise recreational cultivation.
20073 entries1 score change
🇩🇿 Algeria Medical ✓
Algeria sets approval rules for medical and scientific cannabis work
Health-ministry authorisation was required for the listed controlled-drug operations, including cannabis cultivation, and could be issued only for medical or scientific purposes. Applicants had to identify the product, quantity and intended use and supply a criminal-record extract; import and export permits lasted three months per operation. The decree also required stock records and secure storage.
🇮🇱 Israel Medical ✓
Israel sets up its medical cannabis programme
The health ministry began licensing patients and growers on a regular basis. The programme grew into one of the largest in the world relative to population.
1720+3 points
🇮🇹 Italy Medical ✓
Italy recognises THC, dronabinol and nabilone as medicines
A health ministry decree added delta-9-THC, dronabinol and nabilone to Table II, section B, the part of the drug law's lists that covers medicines. It concerned these single substances; cannabis plant medicines followed in 2013. The decree was signed on 18 April and published on 28 April 2007.
20062 entries1 score change
🇪🇸 Spain Medical ✓
Catalonia operates a pilot programme supplying a cannabis medicine
Catalonia's Health Department put a pilot therapeutic-cannabis programme into operation in 2006. Patients received the standardised extract Sativex through foreign-medicine or compassionate-use routes, with observational follow-up in the Seguivex and Seguivex-Emesis studies. The programme involved hospital selection and dispensing with pharmacy follow-up; it was not general retail access to cannabis.
🇫🇮 Finland Medical ✓
Finland begins granting patient-specific medical cannabis permits
Medical cannabis became available through individual special permits, with one permit recorded in 2006 and one in 2007. This was a narrow route for named patients, not general marketing authorisation: a 2011 report described annual permits and specialist assessment after other treatments proved unsuitable or ineffective. Sativex's separate marketing authorisation followed in 2012.
1314+1 point
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🇻🇺 Vanuatu Medical ✓
Vanuatu’s revised drug rules exempt travellers’ labelled medicines
The drug law’s exemption, revised in 2005, covered a personal-use preparation in a reasonable amount, correctly labelled and accompanied by a doctor’s letter from the traveller’s country of origin. The same law separately provided medical or scientific import permits and exemptions for medicines properly prescribed and supplied by qualified practitioners or pharmacists. Cannabis and resin remained listed drugs, with cultivation prohibited outside the later licensed industry route.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓
England and Wales rejects medical necessity defences in cannabis appeals
In Quayle and related cases, the Court of Appeal rejected attempts to justify continuing unlicensed cannabis activities through a medical necessity defence. It held that the proposed defence conflicted with the statutory licensing scheme and rejected the claimed grounds involving chronic pain. The judgment concerned England and Wales and did not establish a new cannabis offence or a prescribing route.
🇩🇪 Germany Medical ✓
Germany's administrative court opens the way to individual medical cannabis permits
In case 3 C 17.04, the Federal Administrative Court held that treating an individual patient could serve the public interest required for an exceptional cannabis acquisition permit. It ordered the federal medicines authority to reconsider a multiple sclerosis patient's application. The court did not itself grant a permit; the authority still had to exercise its discretion and examine the other statutory requirements.
20033 entries0 score changes
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓ Article
CAMS trial reports different results for clinical and patient-rated symptoms
The CAMS trial treated 630 participants at 33 UK centres with oral cannabis extract, THC or placebo. The published results found no treatment effect on the primary Ashworth-scale measure of spasticity, but reported improvements in patient-rated spasticity and pain. These research findings informed debate about evidence and patient experience; they did not authorise cannabis possession or prescribing.
🇳🇱 Netherlands Medical ✓
Dutch pharmacies start dispensing medical cannabis
The Netherlands became the first country where pharmacies supplied cannabis flower on prescription, grown under contract for a government office.
🇨🇦 Canada Medical ✓ Article
Health Canada starts selling cannabis grown in a Manitoba mine
In December 2000 Health Canada gave its first contract to grow cannabis, worth $5.75 million over five years, to Prairie Plant Systems, which grew it 360 metres underground in a disused section of a copper and zinc mine at Flin Flon, Manitoba. After an Ontario judge ruled in January 2003 that patients needed a legal source, the department began selling it in August, at about $5 a gram, collected from a doctor's office. Few of the 580 or so authorised patients bought any.
20021 entry0 score changes
20011 entry1 score change
20002 entries0 score changes
🇨🇦 Canada · Ontario Medical ✓
An Ontario court rules the ban unconstitutional without a medical exemption
In R v. Parker the Ontario Court of Appeal held that prohibiting possession with no workable exception for patients violated the Charter, and gave Parliament a year to fix it. The medical access regulations of 2001 were the result.
🇺🇸 United States · Hawaii Medical ✓
Hawaii establishes its medical cannabis law
Act 228 established Hawaii's initial medical cannabis law. The health department identifies this as the start of the medical-use framework and distinguishes it from the dispensary law adopted in 2015. The 2000 event should not be read as the opening of licensed dispensaries.
19993 entries0 score changes
🇨🇦 Canada Medical ✓
Canada's health minister begins exempting patients one by one
Allan Rock used Section 56 of the drug law to let two AIDS patients grow and use cannabis, and in October added fourteen more people who were very sick or dying. A hundred had applied. In August the health department offered 7.5 million dollars over five years for research into medical cannabis, and it looked for a firm to grow a supply.
🇨🇦 Canada · Ontario Medical ✓
An Ontario judge exempts an AIDS patient from the cannabis ban
Justice Harry LaForme of the Ontario Superior Court granted Jim Wakeford a constitutional exemption from prosecution, so that he could possess and grow cannabis while the health ministry considered his application. Nineteen other patients had applied; government lawyers admitted the ministry had adopted only preliminary guidelines that week. The government did not appeal.
🇺🇸 United States Medical ✓
An American scientific review finds medical promise in cannabinoids
The White House drug policy office had asked the Institute of Medicine to review the evidence. Its report found that cannabinoids appear to help with pain, nausea from chemotherapy and wasting, with modest effects, and advised against smoking as a long-term medicine while allowing it under supervision for patients with no alternative. It found no conclusive evidence that cannabis itself causes people to move on to other drugs.
19982 entries0 score changes
🇬🇧 United Kingdom Medical ✓
Britain licenses a company to grow cannabis for research
Two doctors, Geoffrey Guy and Brian Whittle, founded GW Pharmaceuticals and the same year obtained a licence from the Home Office and the medicines regulator to cultivate, possess and supply cannabis for scientific research. Its mouth spray Sativex, a cannabis extract, became the first natural cannabis derivative to gain market approval in any country, and was approved in the United Kingdom in 2010 for multiple sclerosis.
🇮🇹 Italy Medical ✓
Italian doctors may prescribe cannabinoids
From 1998 doctors could prescribe cannabis products and synthetic cannabinoids on a non- repeatable prescription. In 2007 the therapeutic uses of THC, dronabinol and nabilone were recognised, and in 2013 the active compounds of cannabis were added to the table of medicines.
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🇺🇸 United States · California Medical ✓ Article
California legalises medical cannabis
Proposition 215 let patients with a doctor's recommendation possess and grow cannabis, the first state medical law. Dozens of states followed, and dispensaries became the first legal shops in the country.
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🇺🇸 United States · Arizona Medical ✓
Arizona votes to let doctors prescribe cannabis, which federal law forbids
About 65% of Arizona voters approved Proposition 200, which let doctors prescribe cannabis to seriously ill patients if a second doctor agreed. No doctor could lawfully prescribe a federal Schedule I drug, so the provision never worked. In April 1997 the legislature made it wait for FDA approval, and in 1998 voters rejected that change; California's law of the same day had used the word "recommend".
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🇵🇭 Philippines Medical ✓
The Philippines creates a compassionate-access permit
A health-department order created a case-specific permit for specialised institutions and medical societies to obtain unregistered medicines for terminally or seriously ill patients. This general scheme later became the only route cited for importing a cannabis-based medicine.
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🇺🇸 United States Medical ✓
The United States closes its medical cannabis programme to new patients
Since 1978 the federal government had supplied cannabis to a handful of patients under a compassionate-use programme that grew out of Robert Randall's court case, and in the mid-1980s it was opened to people with AIDS. Under President George H. W. Bush it stopped taking new patients. Forty-three people had been approved; 28 of them never received any. At its peak fifteen people were supplied, and four still were in 2011.
🇮🇱 Israel Medical ✓
Israel begins to permit cannabis for patients
In the early 1990s cannabis was allowed case by case for people with cancer and painful illnesses, the beginning of what became a national programme. In 2004 the army started an experimental treatment of soldiers' post-traumatic stress with THC. By 2012 about 10,000 patients were registered, and by 2017 about 26,000.