Thousands of French medical cannabis patients will continue to receive their treatment for the foreseeable future, as the highly anticipated full generalised framework edges towards reality.
France’s Ministry of Health announced yesterday that patients currently enrolled in the country’s long-running medical cannabis programme will receive another extension beyond the March 31, 2026 deadline, though exactly how long this latest extension will last is unclear.
The announcement, made during a temporary scientific committee meeting of the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety (ANSM), aims to ensure thousands of patients receiving medical cannabis through its pilot programme are not suddenly cut off on April 01, 2026.
While this is a critical move by the French government, it fails to address the wider issue of inaction regarding the country’s incoming generalised framework.
“We really hope that this will come out now,” Hugues Péribère, CEO of French medical cannabis company Overseed, told Business of Cannabis. “We absolutely need a new extension for the patients who are included in the process. But what we are really hoping is that new patients could have permanent access as soon as possible.”
The rapidly evolving situation, and the opportunities it creates, will be examined in rigorous detail next month at Cannabis Europa 2026, organised in partnership with medical cannabis trade organisation UIVEC, where policymakers, healthcare leaders, and industry executives will convene to assess what France’s transition to permanent medical cannabis means in practice.
Regarding yesterday’s news, UIVEC’s President Ludovic Rachou welcomed the extension, but warned it ‘cannot indefinitely replace the expected regulatory decisions…There is no longer any room for ambiguity: the Government must now publish the texts allowing for a lasting exit from the experiment.’
National framework ‘ready to go’
France’s battle to secure access to medical cannabis, which has now been running for five years, is frustratingly close to being enacted, but remains stuck in regulatory limbo.
During 2025, France emerged as one of the most unique and exciting upcoming medical cannabis markets in Europe, submitting detailed plans for a permanent generalised framework to the European Commission for approval in March.
This came as a surprise to many industry hawks, not just because the project appeared on the brink of failure, but because it proposed one of the most considered and unique approaches seen so far in the industry.
After five years of development, political upheaval, and repeated delays, France’s medical cannabis framework is technically complete, having been submitted to the EU in March 2025, approved by Brussels in June 2025, and validated by the Conseil d’État in August 2025.
Now, only ministers’ signatures are needed for the bill to be published in the Journal Officiel, but once again, despite outcry from patients and businesses trying to prepare for the new market, progress has stalled.
“We’ve been building this for five years… It’s not a 180-degree turn,” Péribère explained.
“The big problem we had with the evolution of the regulatory framework was the dissolution of the National Assembly in France. The process was going on, we had milestones to reach in 2024, and then with the dissolution, it was a complete mess.”
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The political chaos meant, as seen repeatedly in markets throughout Europe, that medical cannabis plummeted down the list of political priorities. For the industry, it meant having to continually rebuild political relationships.
“Every time we had to redo the work to make contact with the cabinets, with the minister, all the time wondering if we would have somebody that will be pro or anti-medical cannabis.”
The situation improved briefly in December 2024 with the appointment of Health Minister Yannick Neuder, known to be supportive of medical cannabis. Under his watch, the texts were sent to the EU and subsequently validated. However, just months later, another confidence vote brought down the government.
“At the end of last summer, we considered that the subject was no more than technical; it was in the administrative process to be published,” Péribère says. “But with the mess we had during the autumn, the subject became political again.”
Now, with yet another new Minister of Health in place, the question is simply ‘when will (it) be published?’.
The HAS Bottleneck
Once the framework is published and signed into law, the Haute Autorité de Santé (HAS) must then finalise its crucial reimbursement evaluation, meaning clarity on what patients are expected to pay is also dependent on publication.
In December 2025, HAS explicitly stated it would be unable to complete its work on pricing and reimbursement structures until the Conseil d’État decree governing the evaluation procedure is officially published.
HAS launched its evaluation process in July 2025, setting an ambitious target of delivering final reimbursement recommendations by the end of Q1 2026, a deadline which is now increasingly ambitious given the pilot’s extension beyond March 2026.
Crucially, HAS will also determine prescriber training requirements and broader healthcare system integration, meaning its decisions will have an outsized impact on patient accessibility and the speed of the framework’s rollout.
“The challenge is there… In every country, the question is always the education of the prescribers, the quality of the information we will be able to provide them,” Péribère added.
