Cannabis Europa London 2026 – Key Insights, Day 1

Cannabis Europa London is back at The Barbican Centre for two days of conversations with global cannabis leaders, policymakers, industry analysts and patient representatives, and, as ever, the sun has shown up.

‘Cannabis Europa is always blessed with great weather,’ Stephen Murphy, Co-Founder and CEO of Prohibition Partners, told delegates as he opened proceedings.

As has now become a signature of the conference, hundreds of delegates repeatedly spill into the Barbican’s sun-drenched courtyards between sessions, making connections amid the centre’s striking brutalist architecture, or duck inside to catch the industry’s sharpest voices debate the issues reshaping the market.

Despite the familiar hustle and bustle, this year’s conference is unique. Cannabis Europa 2026 is the industry’s first major convening since the United States moved cannabis to Schedule III, the most significant shift in federal drug policy in half a century. Rescheduling has seeped into almost every conversation of the event’s opening day, both on and off stage.

Europe’s legal medical cannabis market is projected to surpass €1.5 billion, according to Prohibition Partners, and the US rescheduling decision, which for the first time formally recognises cannabis as having medical benefits at the federal level, has brought American and European regulatory frameworks closer together than at any point since legalisation began. What that convergence means for operators, investors and patients on both sides of the Atlantic has become this year’s core focus.

Murphy, got the ball rolling by drawing a direct line between Cannabis Europa’s origins and the moment the industry now finds itself in.

“We first took place in 2018,” he told delegates. ‘Back then, the conversation was very much theoretical. Today it’s very much practical, we are talking about the realities of delivering patients at scale.”

He called on established industry figures to be generous with their time and knowledge toward those entering the space, framing that openness as a collective responsibility.

“It’s ultimately our responsibility to lay the foundation for what we hope is a very progressive, sustainable, and ethically derived industry.”

Opening Session: Derek Chisora and Pierre Van Weperen, Grow Group

The conference began with a personal story, a deliberate choice that Murphy framed as central to how the industry changes minds. Former world heavyweight contender Derek Chisora took to the stage alongside Pierre Van Weperen, Managing Director of Grow Group Limited, to announce the launch of WarOnPain, a patient education platform built around legal medical cannabis access in the UK, and to reveal that he uses prescribed medical cannabis himself.

• Van Weperen highlighted the industry’s inherent limitations. Clinics are barred from using the word cannabis in advertising, many of which delegates likely saw plastered across billboards throughout London on the way to the event.
• The industry, he said, risks talking only to itself. ‘If we as an industry start talking about cannabis, it’s just seen as advertising, we’re speaking to an echo chamber,’ he said.
• Top athletes reach audiences of 20 to 30 million, he argued, a population the industry has so far failed to reach. He pointed to 8 million people on NHS waiting lists for pain management and mental health assessments. ‘That’s actually ridiculous that we’re not doing anything,’ he said.
• Van Weperen said the industry is still battling stigma, and that Chisora’s willingness to speak publicly is rare. ‘I wish there were more people like Derek,’ he said. ‘We know there are a lot of celebrities who consume cannabis, but are scared to speak out.’
• Chisora was candid about the scale of quiet use among elite athletes. ‘The top ten athletes in the world are using cannabis, but they don’t want to speak out,’ he said. ‘For sleep, for recovery. Training hard catches up with you. What’s the best way to sort it out? Pills that damage your kidneys?’
• He said the response to his announcement had already been immediate. ‘It already blows up,’ he said of his phone following news breaking across mainstream media that morning.
• WarOnPain’s education model, built around long-form video content and regulated clinical pathways, is designed to give those athletes, and the millions of people they influence, a visible, legitimate route to explore. The platform is live at waronpain.com.

Rebuilding Cannabis as Healthcare: Where is European Medical Cannabis Heading?

Yuval Soiref, Green Success; Aras Azadian, Avicanna

With US rescheduling bringing fresh North American attention to Europe’s healthcare-led model, this session examined where the industry goes from a position of hard-won credibility rather than hype.

• Aras Azadian, Co-Founder and CEO of Avicanna, framed medical cannabis as a service rather than a product, one that demands patient support, medical affairs, dosing guidance and clinical infrastructure, not simply a prescription and a product to fill it.
• On the shift toward standardised formats, Azadian said: ‘To have a reproducible outcome — something a physician can actually prescribe and expect results from, you have to move away from flower.’ Cannabinoid-based medicine, with standardised dosing, is where the clinical credibility lies.
• Fortune 100 and 500 companies are beginning to move. ‘I’ve seen a complete change in tone over the last three months than I have for the last nine and a half years,’ Azadian said. ‘Once the Americans come in, it’s going to be rough.’
• Yuval Soiref, CEO of Green Success, pointed to fragmentation as the industry’s core structural problem, and argued the solution lies in connected AI-led infrastructure that unifies patient acquisition, retention and operational data rather than the siloed models that defined the first wave of cannabis company building.
• Azadian drew a direct parallel between today’s European market and Canada before adult-use legalisation, and warned that the product format shift that followed in Canada is coming here too: away from combustible flower, toward oils, sublingual and oral formats, driven by both clinical preference and harm reduction pressure.

Policy in Practice: From Workplace Testing to Driving — How Does UK Law Impact Patients?

Richard List, Association of Police Controlled Drug Liaison Officers; Robert Jappie, Fieldfisher; Sal Aziz, PatientsCann

Eight years after medical cannabis was legalised in the UK, police officers are still stopping, arresting and charging patients for lawfully possessing their prescription medicine. This session laid out precisely why, and who is responsible for fixing it.

• Richard List, a retired Detective Chief Superintendent and former head of drugs at Thames Valley Police, was candid about the scale of the problem in the UK. Knowledge of medical cannabis among serving officers remains critically low, including, in many cases, basic awareness that it is legal at all. ‘Patient first, suspect second,’ he said, describing the core principle of National Police Chiefs’ Council guidance he authored, guidance that, he acknowledged, has so far had limited reach into operational practice.
• Negative encounters with police, stops, searches, and arrests continue to be reported regularly and stem almost entirely from officers who simply do not understand the law they are enforcing.
• Sal Aziz of PatientsCann, speaking as a patient, added: ‘As a patient, we can’t be the ones telling them in the moment,’ he said.

• The session’s sharpest exchange came on drug driving. Robert Jappie, a cannabis regulatory lawyer at Fieldfisher and former criminal defence solicitor, said: ‘Ignorance of the law is no defence, that’s what police say to suspects. How is it that eight years on, officers are still ignorant of the law?’
• The legal structure compounds the problem. Under current road traffic law, a medical cannabis patient stopped at the roadside cannot invoke their statutory medical defence until they have already been arrested, taken to a police station and had a blood sample taken. There is no mechanism to resolve the matter at the roadside, regardless of whether a patient has their prescription on them.
• List described two pieces of legislation that effectively work in contradiction: the 2015 drug-driving regime, designed for illicit substances, and the 2018 legalisation of medical cannabis, which was never accompanied by updates to policing procedures or traffic law. ‘The people squeezed in the middle are medical cannabis patients,’ he said.
• List’s association is developing a second edition of the NPCC guidance with a substantially expanded section on driving. His position, which he was clear was not shared by all, was to test for impairment using the established five-point field test, verify prescription documentation at the roadside, and reserve blood sampling for cases where there is reasonable suspicion of concurrent illicit drug use. ‘I want to keep medical cannabis patients out of the police station,’ he said. ‘The police should not be involved in healthcare.’
• Jappie proposed adapting the existing ‘producer’ mechanism used in road traffic stops, requiring a patient to present their prescription, pharmacy label and ID at a police station within seven days, rather than being arrested on the spot. If the documents match, the matter ends there. Failure to produce would then carry the same consequences as failing to provide a specimen in a drink-driving case.
• Jappie closed with a pointed challenge to the room. ‘I think the industry itself needs to do more to protect patients, because these are your customers,’ he said. ‘One of the great selling points for becoming a legal patient should be that you are not harassed by the police, not harassed by employers, not harassed by landlords. Unfortunately, it’s still happening.’

Cannabis in International Law: Is Incremental Progress Enough?

Kojo Koram, Transnational Research Centre on Emerging Drug Markets; Carola Perez, We, The Patients; Steve Rolles, Transform Drug Policy Foundation; Simone van Breda, Union of Coffeeshop Retailers

• Carola Perez opened by challenging the industry to think beyond its own markets. ‘We have to think about all postal codes all over the world,’ she said, pointing to patients in the Caribbean, South America and Asia routinely excluded from conversations about access. On structural patient representation, she said: ‘Patients are represented, but we are a consultative voice. It’s not structural participation. Patients do not get to decide, and this is a huge difference.’
• Kojo Koram set the historical context for international prohibition, noting the 1961 Single Convention’s roots stretch back to 1948, one of the very first initiatives of the new UN system. Its near-universal membership, he argued, was not organic: ‘This wasn’t because Jamaica, Morocco, Egypt suddenly decided they wanted to ban cannabis. Signing up was required to become a member of the international community.’
• On whether meaningful reform can come from the UN, the panel agreed it was unlikely to come from inside the UN itself. ‘Drug reform has always been a bottom-up process, led by local activists, patient groups and traditional growers,’ Steve Rolles of the Transform Drug Policy Foundation said. ‘Sometimes, when reform is proven, it reaches the UN level and rains down on places that haven’t done it yet. But the lead has always come from the ground up.’
• Koram pointed to a growing split within the UN itself, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has called for legalisation and regulation of all drugs, putting it in direct conflict with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, which oversees global drug enforcement.
• On the global south, Koram warned that cannabis industries in countries like Ghana are being built primarily to serve export markets in Europe and North America, sidelining local healthcare needs and indigenous medicine traditions. ‘It ignores the huge need for pain medication within those communities and moves traditional, informal mechanisms of treatment away from local interest and towards the global north consumer market.’
• Perez used Spain as a case in point. ‘Spain is the seventh-largest producer of medical cannabis in the world, and the law only allows oils. If you are a patient under chemotherapy, you are not going to wait, you will go to the street. In the UK, there are only eight prescriptions on the NHS. This medicine is sometimes only for rich people.’
• Koram closed with a warning to the industry on the risk of corporate-led reform without patient and activist community buy-in. ‘When change is driven wholly by corporate interests, it leaves those actors vulnerable to backlash. Prohibition could wipe the board completely clear. The myopia around shared interests between activist communities, patient communities and corporate actors has left reform in many countries subject to exactly that risk.’

All Eyes on Germany: The Path to Profitable Growth and Consolidation 

Tristan Gervais, T Capital; Niklas Kouparanis, Bloomwell; David Henn, Cannamedical; Franziska Katterbach, Oppenhoff; Benedikt Sons, Cansativa

One of the day’s most anticipated panels drew a packed hall, and the session lived up to its title.

• Deutsche Bank‘s move into cannabis financing was described as a watershed, not just for what it unlocks, but for the signal it sends. The bank has confirmed it is open to further deals, but only businesses above €20 million in revenue are being considered, and the focus is firmly on backing winners rather than accumulating market share. Working capital financing for profitable German operators, the panel noted, is now accessible and relatively straightforward.
• Franziska Katterbach, partner at Oppenhoff, told the hall: ‘There has been a renaissance in the industry, big M&A deals, people getting loans from major banks. We need to grasp this moment and do something smart with it.’
• Niklas Kouparanis, CEO of Bloomwell, outlined four consolidation archetypes he expects to shape the market: German companies acquiring German companies; Canadian operators stepping in; a second wave of US MSOs, who, he argued, now need a German footprint to justify their narratives to stakeholders; and big pharma, tobacco and food and beverage, already circling. ‘I think these are the four main consolidators in Germany,’ he said.
• David Henn, CEO of Cannamedical, urged the room not to lose sight of the bigger picture. ‘The biggest deals in Germany are yet to come. I strongly believe there will be so much growth in the next five years. We’ve been waiting ten years for this moment.’ His caution was equally direct: ‘I believe you should be focused on building a company rather than wasting time looking at multiples and worrying about M&A.’
• Benedikt Sons, CEO of Cansativa, was unambiguous on how the market has shifted. ‘It is now all about profitability; revenues are less important now.’ Wholesale multiples have compressed to around six times EBITDA, he said, but companies with genuine tech and patient platform layers can command health tech multiples of ten to fifteen times.
• Katterbach said of the current M&A zeitgeist: ‘You’re really buying execution, not a sheet of paper.’ Recent deal structures reflect this, with earn-out components of close to fifty percent in some transactions, placing the burden of proof squarely on sellers to demonstrate the business will perform.
• She added: ‘There is so much demand in Germany, we now see how much we have left to the drug dealers. The product was always being traded. It’s just in the legal market now.’
• Henn flagged a structural challenge the German market has not yet fully confronted. ‘German mentality is perhaps the problem here, US investors are much more aggressive and brave when it comes to building international companies.’

The US Rescheduling: What It Means, How It Happened, and Where It Leaves Europe

Saphira Galoob, US Cannabis Roundtable; Bryan Lanza, Mercury Consulting; David Ruskin, Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton; Jonathan Havens, Saul Ewing LLP; Sasho Stefanoski, PHCann International; Adrian Fischer, DEMECAN; Bernard Sucher, Essence Investment AG

If rescheduling threaded through every conversation at Cannabis Europa 2026, two dedicated sessions gave it the full examination it demanded. Together, they covered the political mechanics of how the April 22 Department of Justice order came to be, what it actually does and does not do under US law, and what the transatlantic implications are for European operators watching from across the Atlantic.

• Bryan Lanza, a senior adviser on Trump’s first transition team, was direct about what drove the decision. Veterans advocacy was decisive. ‘Several elected officials were veterans who talked about cannabis as a safer alternative to opioids,’ he said. ‘It made the issue a lot more digestible for Republicans.’ Polling by a trusted adviser confirmed the numbers and gave Trump the confidence to move.
• Lanza acknowledged the industry overreached in its expectations. ‘We convinced ourselves, as we do in this industry, that this was going to be the landing point, but if you look at what Trump has always said, this is exactly where he said he was.’
• The administration structured the order to preserve political optionality. If the ongoing DEA Administrative Law Judge process, which opens June 24 and runs for three weeks, potentially producing a ruling in September, delivers adult-use rescheduling, Trump can take credit. If it does not, the independent process takes the blame. ‘That’s just the reality of our politics,’ Lanza said.
• On adult use, Lanza was candid about the obstacle. ‘There are components of this that Trump hates — he hates the smell. He’s not going to take that final step until somebody can tell him how to get the smell off the streets of New York.’
• David Ruskin, partner at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton, did not understate the moment. ‘You can’t minimise the importance of this. It’s the most significant change in US policy in 55 years, probably ever.’
• Jonathan Havens, co-founder of the cannabis law practice at Saul Ewing, clarified exactly what the order covers: FDA-approved cannabis-derived products and all products regulated under state-licensed markets. Adult use is excluded entirely.

• The legal authority used was the treaty powers provision of the Controlled Substances Act, the same international framework underpinning European medical cannabis regulation, giving the DOJ discretion to move medical cannabis immediately. Adult use, if considered, will face the harder standard of the CSA’s abuse potential criteria.
• The 280E tax relief is the most immediately material business consequence. US cannabis operators have been paying effective tax rates of up to 80% because federal law blocked them from deducting ordinary business expenses. That changes for medical. ‘The punitive effects of that go away,’ Havens said, though operators in dual-use states face complex questions about how to apportion sales.
• Interstate commerce between US states remains prohibited. Havens offered a counterintuitive read: ‘Import and export opportunities into and out of the United States is actually easier right now than transporting cannabis across state lines, because at least the framework for international trade exists.’
• On paper, US export and import is now permitted under the final order — but operators must first register with the DEA as producers, importers or exporters. The registration portal has only just opened, initially for dispensaries. Cultivators and manufacturers have not yet been processed. ‘The final order says it’s contemplated and technically allowed,’ Havens said. ‘I don’t think there’s an easy way to do it until DEA tells us who they’re registering.’
• Adrian Fischer, co-CEO of DEMECAN, one of Germany’s first three licensed cultivators — raised the structural barrier on the European side. Germany requires a single central governmental agency to oversee medical cannabis trade, and prohibits imports from markets with dual recreational and medical production. ‘I’d expect three to six months until there’s a final German answer,’ he said. ‘Even if export permits are handed out in the US, you have to wait for Germany’s decision.’
• Bernard Sucher, board member of Essence Investment, pointed to Glass House, a publicly traded California operator — as the first concrete example of US export ambition: the company has converted a greenhouse to CBD-rich flower production and is expected to begin European exports in Q3, making it potentially the first scaled US company to do so. Village Farms, he argued, is the fuller template — GMP-compliant from Canada, already price-competitive in European markets. ‘This future we’re trying to game out — we already have examples of what it looks like.’
• Sasho Stefanoski, CEO of PHCann International, framed the moment in broader terms. ‘We are entering the most transformative decade ahead of us.’ But he was equally realistic about the timeline. ‘US companies are not ready for full-scale export, most are not working to GMP standards. I see a hybrid model over the next three to five years: licensing, co-manufacturing, white label, IP transfer. Globalisation of this industry is coming, it just means quality meeting pharmaceutical requirements, regardless of where the product comes from.’