The UK’s medical cannabis industry has nearly tripled in size since 2022, according to new Freedom of Information data offering the most comprehensive look into what is being prescribed in the UK to date.
FOI figures, secured by Prohibition Partners and analysed by Business of Cannabis, have provided in-depth figures on individual unlicensed cannabis based medicinal products (CBPMs) prescribed privately since 2022.
While the UK’s market is one of Europe’s biggest, reliable data on just how big is nearly impossible to find, with even the most informed industry insiders’ estimates having error margins of tens of thousands of patients.
This data offers a rare insight into the size of the market and the preferred strains and strengths of consumers, but it also shines a light on why data-backed analysis of the market is so difficult.
In the first of a series of deep dives in the UK market based on this data, we look into its rapid growth, the shift in dominance of popular strains, and the dramatic swing towards higher THC products.
To enquire about detailed datasets on the UK and beyond, contact Prohibition Partners here.
262% growth in two years
Despite these limitations, the cleaned dataset reveals remarkable growth. Total matched flower volume increased from 2.7m grams in 2022 to 5.25m grams in 2023, then to 9.8m grams in 2024.
This represents year-on-year growth of 94% between 2022 and 2023, followed by 87% growth between 2023 and 2024. Over the two years, matched volumes increased by 262%.
Early figures for 2025 show this growth trajectory continuing, with January and February alone exceeding one tonne of matched flower volume, suggesting growth has not yet peaked.
These figures point to both a significant growth in the patient population, but also larger average prescription sizes, indicating both market expansion and increased consumption among existing patients.
Product dominance shift
The early years of the UK private medical cannabis market were dominated by a single high-THC flower: Adven’s EMT-2 T20 (Cairo strain). Across the cleaned dataset, it accounts for roughly one-third of all dispensed flower, approximately 6.1 tonnes, peaking in 2023 at over 3.3 tonnes alone.
By 2024, however, a newer rival had usurped its position. Curaleaf’s Lavender Cake LCE T20 was effectively invisible in 2022, barely registering in 2023 with just 4 kilograms, then exploded to more than 3.5 tonnes in 2024. The first two months of 2025 saw a further 196 kilograms prescribed.
THC levels have reshaped the market
One of the most striking trends we’ve garnered from the cleaned data set is a dramatic shift towards higher potency cannabis.
While this is by no means unique to the UK, it’s worth noting that higher THC does not reliably provide greater analgesia, as discussed during last month’s Cannabis Health Symposium.
In 2022, most prescribed flower sat in the mid-THC range, with roughly 57% of matched volume between 18-22% THC and only 11% stronger than 22% THC.
By 2024, that dynamic had transformed. Products above 22% THC accounted for around one-third of all matched volume, and by the first two months of 2025, they made up almost half.
Mid-range THC products (10–22%) have lost massive amounts of market share as prescribers and patients gravitate toward stronger flowers, illuminating a structural shift in prescribing patterns towards higher-potency cannabis, rather than a simple scaling up of earlier product mixes.
The UK’s chronic data problem
The raw dataset published in the FOI response contained over 132,000 data points, listing the product name, strength, producer and volume of prescriptions dispensed every year from the start of 2022 until February 2025.
Unlike Germany, Australia or Canada, the UK has no centralised tracking system, no mandatory product registry and no standardised naming conventions. Clinics, pharmacies and importers all record information differently, often relying on free-text fields rather than structured inputs.
In its response, the NHSBSA makes clear that the dataset is inherently inconsistent. Private unlicensed cannabis prescriptions are ‘manually recorded from often handwritten prescriptions,’ and there is ‘no standardised naming convention for the product names, strength, or volume.’
As a result, the same product often appears multiple times under slightly different descriptions, a problem the FOI team warns ‘may lead to duplication of some product names, strength, or volume.’
Much of this prescribing was initially captured as an ‘unspecified drug,’ because unlicensed cannabis products were not present in the NHSBSA drug database. They were only identified later through ‘an additional review process,’ which assigns the item to the date written rather than the date submitted.
The NHSBSA further cautions that these figures ‘may be subject to change if prescriptions are submitted to us in later months’.
Business of Cannabis reconstructed the dataset using a canonical product dictionary derived of known products, normalised all FOI entries, and applied fuzzy-matching with potency and brand constraints to assign each record to a real, verifiable medical cannabis product.
Focusing specifically on flower products, coverage varied significantly by year. The 2023 and 2024 data achieved match rates above 90%, meaning the vast majority of dispensed flower volume could be reliably assigned to specific products. However, 2022 data was less reliable, with only 77.5% of volume successfully matched due to naming errors, missing potency information and ambiguous entries.
The extraordinary effort needed to establish even basic market metrics illuminates a foundational issue in the market, making it even harder to provide data-driven arguments for greater access, wasting an invaluable opportunity to investigate this often maligned industry, and offering an unfair commercial advantage to those with enough private data to derive actionable insights.
