The story
Poland legalised medical cannabis in 2017, but patients could not immediately buy it. The first registered dried flower finally reached three pharmacies in December 2018, more than a year after the law took effect.
Legal on paper
The 2017 reform allowed cannabis herb, resin and extracts to be used as pharmaceutical raw material for medicines prepared in pharmacies. Parliament had passed the measure by 440 votes to two.
Yet the new legal route had no registered domestic product. Forsal reported in September 2018 that no patient had benefited during the law’s first year. Producers faced rules requiring the raw material to meet pharmaceutical standards, including a consistent, declared concentration of active ingredients.
Before registration, medicines brought in through individual import procedures were expensive, and the Health Ministry generally refused reimbursement. Formal legality therefore had not become ordinary pharmacy access.
Spectrum Cannabis, part of Canada’s Canopy Growth, submitted a dried-flower product for registration in June 2018. The company said it intended to add capsules and oils later rather than register several products at once.
The first sale
On 17 December, Spider’s Web reported that medical cannabis was available on prescription in three pharmacies: in Poznań, Konin and Wrocław. The dried flower contained about 19 per cent THC and cost roughly 60–65 złoty per gram.
The first shipment was only seven kilograms. The history entry records that it served about 300 patients and sold out within days. Those figures capture the bottleneck: the law had opened a route, but a small imported delivery could not create broad, reliable access.
Access, not general legalisation
The product was a prescription pharmaceutical raw material. The reform did not permit patients to grow their own cannabis and did not change recreational possession or supply offences. Poland had legal medicine while retaining prohibition outside the medical channel.
What moved in the index
The vote in 2017 had raised Poland’s access score from 0 to 1 because a legal medical framework existed. The first pharmacy supply raised it again, from 1 to 2, because patients could finally obtain a registered product in practice. The other five segment scores remained unchanged.[1][2]
Score by segment 0 to 10
- Possession · 25%1 → 1
- Personal cultivation · 25%1 → 1
- Punishment & enforcement · 20%2 → 2
- Sharing & gifting · 10%1 → 1
- Consumption · 10%1 → 1
- Legal access · 10%1 → 3+2
The bar shows the score after the change; the tick marks where it stood before. The scores after the change are Poland's current scores.
References
Checked. The date and the event were compared with a source that was read. The score before the change is an editorial estimate.