More than a year has passed since the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) was commissioned to conduct a formal review of the UK’s medical cannabis industry.
Aside from its call for evidence weeks later, there has been radio silence on behalf of the ACMD ever since. This includes any updates on its scheduled publication date, the end of ‘summer 2026’, meaning the landmark review should be just weeks away.
Just as it has since the industry burst into life following the 2018 amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act, the industry has quietly continued its exponential growth with minimal political scrutiny within the confines of a hastily drafted framework.
New data from two separate Freedom of Information (FOI) requests illustrate the staggering rate of growth but also the inherent limitations with the current framework.
The full 2025 picture
FOI-03941 is the first release to capture the full 2025 calendar year of private unlicensed cannabis dispensing in England, plus the first two months of 2026. Twelve months of settled data beyond what our December 2025 analysis was able to report.
The private unlicensed specials market grew by 154% between 2024 and 2025, from 668,511 items to 1,701,064 dispensed in English community pharmacies.
That comes on top of 136% growth the year before, and 128% the year before that. Since 2019, the first full calendar year in which private unlicensed cannabis was dispensed at scale in England, the market has expanded by a factor of more than 6,000.
This growth curve has continued to steepen. In January 2026 alone, the most recent month of complete data captured in the FOI response, English community pharmacies dispensed 80,331 items.
NHSBSA prescribing data of this kind is subject to significant lag, as cannabis items are initially captured as an ‘unspecified drug’ and only identified through a subsequent manual review, with the NHSBSA itself warning that ‘these figures may be subject to change if prescriptions are submitted to us in later months’.
As such, the January 2026 figure should therefore be read as a floor and currently suggests an annualised run rate of just under a million items.
Private unlicensed cannabis items dispensed in England, 2019–2026
Total prescription items by calendar year. Growth compounded at 128–154% year-on-year through 2025.
Source: NHS Business Services Authority FOI-03941 Part 1 (July 30, 2026), secured by Prohibition Partners. 2026 figure is January only; February data was still being processed at time of release.
Supply closely matching demand
A separate FOI request submitted by Prohibition Partners and analysed by Business of Cannabis covers UK imports of unlicensed cannabis flower, tracking the same trajectory from the supply side.
Imports reached 30,120 kg in 2025, up from 15,025 kg in 2024. Adjusting for a 2023 anomaly in the Home Office data series (a 20,113 kg figure attributed to Finland, which does not export medical cannabis), the underlying volume has approximately doubled year on year for two consecutive years.
Canada is now the source of 57% of that volume. Canadian producers shipped 17,067 kg of cannabis flower directly to the UK in 2025, up from 2,579 kg the year before. As Business of Cannabis reported in May 2026, this reflects a structural shift in supply, with Canadian producers processing product in domestic EU-GMP facilities and shipping direct rather than routing through Spanish or Portuguese converters.
Portugal has grown its shipments to the UK ten-fold since 2023, from 384 kg to 3,971 kg. Meanwhile, Spain, once the dominant European processing hub, has seen quarterly volumes fall from 1,570 kg in Q1 2025 to 252 kg in Q4.
UK cannabis flower imports by country of origin, 2023–2025
Kilograms of unlicensed specials flower imported. Canada supplied 57% of the 2025 total, up from 17% the year before.
Source: UK Home Office FOI2026/10126 (August 11, 2026), secured by Prohibition Partners. 2023 total adjusted to exclude a ~20,113 kg data anomaly attributed to Finland in the first two quarters, consistent with prior Prohibition Partners / Business of Cannabis analysis.
By comparing the FOI data from the NHSBSA and the Home Office, we can form a reliable and comprehensive picture of the UK’s current supply and demand, even if data on the number of active patients remains elusive.
Community pharmacies dispensed approximately 19.4 tonnes of flower to patients across the 1.4 million flower items in the 2025 FOI data, an average of 13.7 grams per item, consistent with the mix of 10-gram and 28-gram flower units in the prescription record.
Against 30.1 tonnes imported, the ~10.8-tonne gap maps closely to Q4 2025’s own import volume of 11,898 kg, pointing to wholesale-scale year-end build-up in the supply chain ahead of Q1 2026 dispensing.
READ MORE…
Cannabis 2.0
For the first time, the Home Office data also captures Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol extracts. Tracked separately only since 2024, following changes to INCB international reporting standards, extracts cover the oils, tinctures and cartridge preparations that sit alongside dried flower in the specials market.
Extract imports rose from 114.3 kg in 2024 to 395.5 kg in 2025, a 246% year-on-year increase. Spain led on volume (156.1 kg), but Canadian producers are again worth watching.
Canadian extract shipments rose from 4.8 kg in 2024 to 152.3 kg in 2025, a 32-fold increase in a single year that mirrors the same producers’ flower play. South Africa, Portugal and North Macedonia added a further 75 kg between them. Australia, the only country to shrink, fell from 33.5 kg to 7.5 kg.
UK Δ9-THC extract imports by country, 2024 vs 2025
Kilograms of THC extracts (oils, tinctures, cartridge preparations). First reported category — data only tracked from 2024 following INCB reporting harmonisation. Total imports up 246% year-on-year.
Source: UK Home Office FOI2026/10126 Annex A (August 11, 2026), secured by Prohibition Partners. Δ9-THC extract data only available from 2024 under INCB reporting standards.
The category is still small relative to flower (400 kg against 30 tonnes) but its growth rate is faster, and its emergence signals a supply chain moving beyond botanicals into higher-margin, higher-processed formats. A commercial supply chain, in other words, behaving as commercial supply chains do.
Yet, this direction of travel maps neatly onto where Europe’s newer medical frameworks are heading. Spain’s Royal Decree 903/2025 excludes cannabis flower entirely in favour of ‘oils and other extract-based preparations’, while France’s 2026 framework restricts flower to sealed-vape formats and requires all products to meet pharmaceutical standards.
Multiple industry sources have described a growing concern within the ACMD and MHRA about the prevalence of flower in the UK, particularly products bearing the branding of recreational products, this category could soon hold significant weight.
Inherent limitations
The raw NHSBSA dataset released with FOI-03941 contained more than 375,000 line items across the seven years it covers.
It captured 10,190 distinct product name entries in 2025 alone. Most of those are duplicates, the same underlying products entered under slight variations in spelling, potency notation and volume, because unlicensed prescriptions are captured as free-text on the NHS system, from often handwritten scripts, and only identified as cannabis on a subsequent manual review.
With the incoming review, this critical pain point is likely to be addressed, not least because it has undoubtedly impacted the ACMD’s own ability to form an accurate picture of the market.
The ACMD’s November 2020 review, the last time the government looked at how well the 2018 legislation was working, recommended the establishment of a CBPM patient registry as ‘crucial for future assessments of the impact of the rescheduling of CBPMs in November 2018.’
When the registry finally launched in mid-2025, four years late, it captured around 1,000 NHS patients on Sativex, Epidyolex and Nabilone, and explicitly excluded the ~60,000-plus private patients through which the market has actually grown.
Beyond these administrative limitations, lie the real issues impacting the very patients the framework was intended to help.
For an estimated 100,000 UK patients receiving treatment in 2025, the 10,190 distinct product-name variants recorded in a single year describe a therapeutic landscape without cross-clinic pharmacopoeia, without generic equivalence and without the standardised prescribing base a NICE-scale evidence review would require.
The market is almost entirely self-funded, meaning families with children on treatment-resistant epilepsy pathways are reported to be paying around £1,500 a month out of pocket for products the ACMD’s own 2020 review acknowledged had a ‘lack of evidence on cost-effectiveness’.
If the review is published on schedule, it will coincide with the two most consequential years for the UK medical cannabis industry since 2018. This ecosystem, as it stands, has evolved around guidelines which were never intended to regulate a market of this scale.
Correction, August 27, 2026: An earlier version of this piece stated that the 30 tonnes of flower imported in 2025 divided into 1.7 million prescription items at an average of just under 18 grams per item. That calculation included non-flower items (oils, tinctures, cartridges) in the denominator. The corrected figure is 13.7 grams per flower item, calculated from 1.4 million flower items in the NHSBSA FOI. Approximately 19.4 tonnes of flower were dispensed against 30.1 tonnes imported, a gap consistent with year-end supply-chain build-up.
