Switzerland has granted approval for a new five-year, 5000-participant adult-use cannabis pilot trial, marking the eighth since the groundbreaking project began in 2023.
Announced on June 16 by the Swiss Cannabis Research Association, CanLeg will take place in the Canton of St. Gallen, and will be the first pilot to test the home delivery of cannabis products to consumers.
It will also mark the second pilot project to be run by the organisation, having launched the country’s largest study so far, Cannabis Research Zürich, in 2024.
What will CanLeg study?
CanLeg will be conducted by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich and the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich, and led by economists Dr Andreas Beerli of ETH Zurich’s KOF Swiss Economic Institute and Professor Michel Maréchal of the University of Zurich’s Department of Economics.
Its core research aim will ask how the form of access to cannabis products impacts participants’ consumption habits, and will be constructed as a randomised control trial (RCT), as with around half of the current pilots.
The 5000 participants, now being recruited, will be split across three groups. Two will receive legal cannabis either through a pharmacy or home delivery, while a third control group will receive nothing.
The study is divided into two parts. The first, lasting around ten weeks, examines participants’ willingness to pay for different cannabis products and their perceptions of quality.
Full opacity = randomised controlled trial (RCT) · Lighter = observational study
Source: Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), June 2026 · Planned durations; operational start dates may differ
Next, a long-term study running for up to four years will examine how access to legal cannabis, and the channel through which it is accessed, affects consumption behaviour, health outcomes and displacement of the black market.
Participants outside of the control group will have access to a broad range of products supplied by several Swiss operators.
Thirteen flower products, four hashish products and four THC oil products will be provided by Alpina Pharma and SwissExtract.
An additional five vape products will be supplied by SwissExtract and Charlies Lab, alongside four edibles options from SwissExtract and Alpen Group.
For the control group required to purchase their cannabis from pharmacies, sales points will operate from stores in Sargans, Buchs and Rorschach, and from Swiss Cannabis Centres in Wil and Rapperswil-Jona.
Notably, all participants will be required to bring a two-gram sample of their current black-market cannabis supply to the intake interview, a step approved by the FOPH, giving researchers a baseline against which to track market displacement over the course of the study.
Like the majority of the approved pilots so far, CanLeg is classified by the FOPH as a commercial market model, with products sold for profit through pharmacies, speciality stores and by post. Five of the eight approved pilots operate under commercial structures, the remainder use non-profit, state monopoly or mixed models.
