Patients
People using cannabis as medicine: their cases, groups and campaigns.
134 entries, 1952–2026 · 14 moved a score · back to the whole history
World average score and Patients 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.
🇦🇺 Australia · New South Wales Easing ✓
NSW assents to a registered-patient cannabis-driving reform
Act 33 of 2026 received assent after passing Parliament on 17 September. The announced scheme would require a prescription, registration and education, and would be limited to unrestricted non-commercial drivers. A positive roadside test would still bring a 24-hour driving ban; laboratory THC below 50 ng/ml would bring no further action, while the first two detections at or above that threshold within two years would bring warnings. Implementation was expected in late 2026 or early 2027, and commencement was not established in this review.
🇲🇺 Mauritius Debate ✓
Mauritius receives a national cannabis-policy reform report
The National Agency for Drug Control presented its cannabis-policy reform report to the Prime Minister after consultation involving around 1,800 contributors, including patients and people affected by drug use. The official announcement confirms delivery of recommendations; it does not establish adoption, a new possession allowance or legal recreational sales.
🇰🇼 Kuwait Other law ✓ Article
Kuwait sets seed records and secure sites for licensed research growers
Newly published Health Ministry rules limited controlled-plant cultivation permits to eligible government and research or educational institutions for medical or scientific purposes, Al-Jarida reported. They required a responsible pharmacist, seed and crop records, secure premises and official supervision of destruction when the licensed purpose ended. The rules implemented the institutional cultivation route in the 2025 drug law.
🇧🇷 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.
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🇨🇾 Cyprus Debate ✓
Cyprus’s Volt party proposes a regulated cannabis market for adults
Volt Cyprus called for legal adult possession and a licensed cannabis market overseen by an independent regulator. Its proposal included controlled production, retail and clubs, taxation, and easier medical access through the national health system. The party argued that criminalisation burdened courts, harmed young people and strengthened the illicit market, and invited public discussion.
🇪🇸 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.
🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan Other law ✓
Kyrgyzstan adopts new drug lists, quantity rules and licensing controls
The cabinet adopted replacement controlled-drug lists, quantity criteria and rules for lawful handling of controlled substances. The rules prohibit ordinary medical use and retail trade in the banned narcotic list while retaining narrow research and official-use exceptions. Cannabis oil, resin, plant material, marijuana and extracts appear in that prohibited list in the later consolidated text.
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🇸🇱 Sierra Leone Medical ✓ Article
Sierra Leone sets licensing rules for medical cannabis growers
Licensed companies, manufacturers and approved health organisations could apply to grow and process cannabis under Pharmacy Board guidelines focused on medical production for export. The rules required suitable staff, secure sites, traceable planting material and inspections, using permission powers already contained in the 2001 pharmacy law. The document gives 17 May 2024 as its effective date and focuses on cultivation, harvesting and processing for medicinal products.
🇨🇼 Curaçao Debate ✓
Curaçao’s advisers seek clearer rules for future drug exemptions
Curaçao’s Advisory Council asked the government to explain why its replacement drug bill would let it exempt substances, activities or circumstances from existing prohibitions. The council wanted a reasoned explanation with examples, alongside clearer procedures for individual permissions. The final July law kept an exemption power covering cannabis but required the government to seek Parliament’s approval before making such a decree.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Other law ✓
US Virgin Islands certify the rules for cannabis licences and patient cards
Lieutenant Governor Tregenza Roach certified and attested the cannabis rules on 13 May, following Governor Albert Bryan Jr.’s approval dated 4 May. The rules covered patient registration, business applications, testing and sacramental use, and distinguished conditional awards from permission to buy or sell cannabis. Conditional dispensary approvals followed in January 2026.
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🇷🇴 Romania Debate ✓ Article
Romania’s Senate rejects replacing cannabis charges with a three-gram fine
The Senate rejected a bill that would have replaced criminal penalties for possessing up to three grams of cannabis for personal use with an administrative fine of 1,000–3,000 lei. Its electronic roll call records 103 votes for the rejection report, one against and four abstentions. The proposal then went to the Chamber of Deputies, where a joint committee rejection report followed in December.
🇬🇮 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.
🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands Debate ✓
BVI’s premier proposes a route for doctors to administer cannabis
Premier Natalio Wheatley said talks with the UK had identified a route towards licensing local doctors to administer medical cannabis. He proposed considering regulations under existing legislation while reconsidering the unassented 2020 licensing bill. Work on the approval arrangements was still to be completed.
🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Legalisation ✓ Article
US Virgin Islands sign adult-use cannabis and patient growing into law
Governor Albert Bryan Jr. signed a law setting adult possession limits at two ounces of cannabis, 14 grams of concentrate and one ounce of cannabis products. Qualified resident patients could grow six flowering and six immature plants for personal medical use with landowner consent. Bryan also announced pardons for simple possession and an application process; in March his administration said use and sales still awaited implementing regulations.
1633+17 points
🇬🇱 Greenland Easing ✓ Article
Greenland allows low-THC cannabis through authorised importers
Greenland’s new drug law and regulation took effect together, creating an exception for cannabis products with no more than 0.2% THC imported by an authorised legal entity. The law retained prescription and pharmacy routes for controlled medicines and replaced the inherited Danish statute. The change followed parliament’s 2019 calls for access to low-THC oils.
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🇹🇱 Timor-Leste Debate ✓ Article
Timor-Leste’s president urges a different approach to cannabis
President José Ramos-Horta urged Timor-Leste to distinguish cannabis from methamphetamine and heroin, and to reconsider the costs of punitive prohibition. Speaking to Parliament after cannabis investigations in Dili, he criticised procedural failures that could undermine the presumption of innocence and argued for considering medical and economic uses. His intervention followed the justice minister’s call for tougher penalties; in November he again advocated medical cannabis in his independence-anniversary address.
🇸🇽 Sint Maarten Debate ✓ Article
Sint Maarten seeks studies before deciding how to legalise cannabis
Health minister Omar Ottley invited local and international organisations to propose studies and a route towards a regulated cannabis industry. The government wanted to assess the economic, social and medical effects before deciding how legalisation should work, with proposals due on 5 December. A formal inter-ministerial committee followed in February 2024.
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🇻🇬 British Virgin Islands Debate ✓ Article
BVI lawmakers approve a medical cannabis licensing bill
The BVI House of Assembly passed a bill to create a cannabis licensing authority and a regulated cultivation, processing and distribution system. The published proposal included dispensaries and different routes for medical documents and declarations of therapeutic use. Assent then depended on further BVI–UK work over licensing responsibilities and international obligations.
🇦🇼 Aruba Other law ✓ Article
Aruba creates an agency to oversee medicinal cannabis production
Aruba created a medicinal-cannabis agency within the health ministry, with effect from 1 June 2020, to oversee a controlled cultivation, manufacturing and trading system. Its tasks included permits, quality controls, records and coordination of stocks and exports to meet international treaty requirements. A later government call invited cultivation and processing proposals, with awards contingent on legislative changes and agreements.
🇦🇼 Aruba Tightening ✓
Aruba withdraws the CBD exemption for supplements and other products
Aruba withdrew the rule that exempted specified low-THC CBD products, including supplements, foods and external-use preparations, from medicinal classification. Health minister Dangui Oduber said the December rule did not fully match the intended CBD policy. The health inspectorate’s current guidance treats CBD products with no more than 0.2% THC as medicines requiring permission for commercial import, storage and distribution.
🇲🇭 Marshall Islands Enforcement ✓
Marshall Islands reports suspended jail term for a personal cannabis import
A January newspaper report described a six-month suspended sentence and a $1,000 fine for Gandhi Heine after he pleaded guilty to importing marijuana. His lawyer said the cannabis was for personal use to relieve back pain. Chief Justice Carl Ingram approved the plea agreement, which included probation conditions restricting travel outside Majuro.
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🇦🇼 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.
🇧🇲 Bermuda Debate ✓
Bermuda proposes locally grown cannabis for medical inhalation
Attorney-General Kathy Lynn Simmons opened consultation on a scheme for prescribed cannabis to be smoked or vaped, with a new authority licensing local cultivation and manufacturing. The proposal followed the 2014 pharmaceutical law and 2019 hemp exemption. After public feedback questioned the narrow scope and regulatory cost, the government shifted towards a wider adult-use licensing plan in 2020.
🇸🇨 Seychelles Other law ✓
Seychelles appeal court lifts an order to write medical drug rules
The appeal court set aside an order requiring ministers to write medical and scientific drug regulations in Alexander Geers’s separate cannabis case. The majority held that the Constitutional Court could not grant that remedy after finding no breach of his constitutional rights; Geers’s own appeal also failed. Two judges dissented on lifting the order, while agreeing that his appeal should be dismissed.
🇭🇰 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.
🇫🇴 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.
🇨🇼 Curaçao Debate ✓ Article
Curaçao’s advisers question financing of a medical cannabis industry
Curaçao’s Advisory Council asked the government to strengthen its medical-cannabis production bill before sending it to Parliament. It found insufficient support for the economic case and asked how the proposed cannabis bureau would finance harvest purchases and recover its money from buyers. By September, local reporting said a bill for that bureau had reached Parliament.
🇫🇴 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.
🇫🇴 Faroe Islands Debate ✓
Faroese MPs reopen the debate over access to medical cannabis
MP Jenis á Rana resubmitted a proposal to let Faroese patients join Denmark’s medical-cannabis trial after parliament rejected it in 2018. Many MPs now supported wider access but argued that the health minister could add products to the medicines list without a new law. Minister Sirið Stenberg offered to discuss that route with the social affairs committee; official medical guidance dates the trial scheme’s start to April 2019.
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🇳🇴 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
🇧🇲 Bermuda Other law ✓
Bermuda’s court confirms patients can seek medical import licences
In Michael Brangman’s case, Bermuda’s Supreme Court confirmed that the minister had power to consider applications to import and possess cannabis for medical purposes, according to contemporary reporting. The minister could still refuse an application. The hearing followed the 2014 law naming prescription cannabinoid medicines and clarified an existing licensing power.
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🇵🇷 Puerto Rico Medical ✓
Puerto Rico’s governor orders a route to medical cannabis
Governor Alejandro García Padilla directed the health secretary to follow the drug law’s procedures, reclassify cannabis components as appropriate and authorise their medical use. The order argued that patients’ health required distinguishing medical from nonmedical use and required a progress report within three months. Regulations and licensing followed before dispensaries began serving patients in December 2016.
🇷🇸 Serbia Debate ✓
Serbia’s patients ask the health ministry to permit cannabis treatment
Lekalizacija Srbije submitted a request to bring cannabis into medical treatment, with documentation concerning several hundred patients and examples of regulation abroad. Milan Savić, the association’s vice-president and director of Belgrade’s Sveti Sava hospital, delivered it to the Health Ministry. The campaign sought a change in the law; a ministry committee later supported three cannabinoid medicines while rejecting cannabis oil.
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🇻🇮 US Virgin Islands Debate ✓
US Virgin Islands voters back legislation for medical cannabis
Voters supported asking the legislature to consider licensing and regulating medical cannabis patients, caregivers, growers and distribution centres, with 56.5% in favour. The later medical-cannabis bill cited the referendum as a reason to protect patients and regulate supply. Governor Albert Bryan Jr. signed that programme into law in January 2019.
🇬🇺 Guam Medical ✓ Article
Guam voters approve cannabis for patients with serious illnesses
Guam voters approved medical cannabis with 56.48% voting yes. The law protected qualifying patients and caregivers with medical certification and registration, and directed health officials to create rules for local production and distribution. Patients later gained a home-cultivation permit route in 2018 while dispensaries remained unavailable.
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🇷🇴 Romania Debate ✓ Article
Romanian agencies deny reports of a new medical cannabis legalisation
After reports that Romania had legalised medical cannabis, a contemporary account quoted the national drug agency saying there had been no legislative change and no cannabis medicine had been approved for the Romanian market. The medicines agency said Sativex could seek authorisation, but its manufacturer had not approached it. Existing law already restricted medical use to prescribed pharmaceutical preparations.
🇮🇹 Italy Debate ✓
Patients with multiple sclerosis found a cannabis club in Puglia
Lucia Spiri and Andrea Trisciuoglio, both living with multiple sclerosis, founded LaPianTiamo in Racale, Puglia, as a cannabis social club for patients. They wanted to grow cannabis together and get a steadier supply than the slow import procedure gave them. Growing together was not allowed by law, so the club was also a campaign to change it.
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🇦🇹 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
🇷🇼 Rwanda Other law ✓
Rwanda sets authorisation rules for medical and research drugs
Rwanda required authorisation for producing, distributing and using controlled drugs for medical or research purposes, with record keeping and controls on cross-border trade. The law took effect on 9 April 2012 and directed the health minister to set security and authorisation rules. That power later supported the cannabis licensing order issued in 2021.
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🇸🇪 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.
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🇷🇴 Romania Other law ✓ Article
Romania requires prescriptions and licences for cannabis medicines
Romania’s new controlled-substances law placed cannabis, resin, extracts and tinctures among drugs with recognised medical interest under strict control. Patients could receive them only as pharmaceutical preparations made industrially or in a pharmacy, on prescription; cultivation and commercial handling required authorisation. The law was published in December 2005 and took effect seven months later.
🇫🇮 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.
🇩🇪 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.
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🇨🇦 Canada Medical ✓ Article
Canada opens legal medical access
After courts ruled that a ban with no medical exemption was unconstitutional, federal regulations let authorised patients possess cannabis and grow their own or name a grower. Recreational possession stayed a crime.
1315+2 points
🇪🇸 Spain Debate ✓
Catalonia's Parliament asks the government to seek medical cannabis permission
The Parliament of Catalonia approved a non-legislative proposal urging the regional executive to work with the relevant administrations to obtain authorisation for therapeutic cannabis use. The initiative followed advocacy by the breast-cancer patients' association Grup Àgata and preceded the regional pilot programme. The motion itself did not authorise prescriptions or supply.
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🇬🇧 United Kingdom Debate ✓ Article
British patients form the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics
Clare Hodges, who had multiple sclerosis and had found that smoking cannabis relieved symptoms that nine years of orthodox medicine had not, set up the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics with other patients who were medicating themselves. Modelled on the American group of the same name, it campaigned for research into cannabis and for access through the National Health Service.
🇬🇱 Greenland Other law ✓
Greenland takes responsibility for its own drug laws
Greenland took over legislative responsibility for euphoriant substances when it assumed responsibility for health services in 1992. Existing health legislation continued until replaced locally, so later Danish cannabis reforms needed Greenlandic decisions to apply there. This became central to the later debate about low-THC oils.
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🇺🇸 United States · California Debate ✓
San Francisco voters support medical cannabis through Proposition P
Voters approve a declaration of policy recommending that California and the California Medical Association restore hemp medical preparations to available medicines and protect prescribing physicians. Dennis Peron and Mary Jane Rathbun campaign for the measure. The declaration expresses local support; it does not create an exemption from state or federal criminal law. California's statewide patient exemption follows in 1996.
🇲🇴 Macau Easing ✓ Article
Macau gives personal possession a fine-only alternative to prison
Macau’s 1991 replacement drug law punished personal acquisition or possession with up to three months in prison or a 500–10,000 pataca fine, replacing the old six-month prison term accompanied by a fine. Possession for therapeutic purposes had a separate fine-only penalty, and people dependent on drugs could receive treatment-related measures. The law listed cannabis, resin and oil; its personal-use approach continued in the 2009 replacement before penalties rose in 2017.
911+2 points
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🇺🇸 United States Debate ✓
Randall and O’Leary publicly launch the Alliance for Cannabis Therapeutics
Robert Randall and Alice O’Leary publicly launch ACT, an alliance seeking medical access for patients. O’Leary dates its public launch to September 1980; her biographical account and legal historian Lewis Grossman also place its founding in 1980. It campaigns for medical access and assists patients seeking federal authorisation.
🇰🇮 Kiribati Other law ✓ Article
Kiribati regulates prescription supply of cannabis extracts and tinctures
Registered pharmacists could prepare cannabis extracts and tinctures at their shops under regulations effective from 21 February 1980. Lawfully prescribed preparations could be possessed by patients, while dispensers had to check prescriptions, keep drugs locked and record supplies. This regulated the preparations already listed separately in the dangerous-drug schedule, alongside the continuing ban on ordinary cannabis possession and cultivation.
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🇰🇼 Kuwait Other law ✓
Kuwait authorises fees for controlled-drug permits
An amendment effective on publication authorised the head of the Health Department to set fees for procedures under the drug-control law. The earlier law covered Indian hemp alongside other drugs and required permits for imports and exports by eligible pharmacies, laboratories and institutions.
🇰🇼 Kuwait Ban ✓ Article
Kuwait places Indian hemp under licensed drug controls
A drug-control law took effect on gazette publication, expressly listing Indian hemp and all its preparations and derivatives. Unauthorised possession, purchase, sale and transfer were prohibited, while patients could hold prescribed quantities for medical reasons and licensed institutions could handle drugs under permit. Violations carried up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 3,000 rupees, subject to any stronger criminal-law penalty.
1002−98 points