Greece Pushes Hemp Flower Ban Despite EU Law Conflict Warning

Greece’s parliament is now considering legislation that would prohibit the retail sale of dried hemp flower nationwide — even though the government’s own statutory advisory body has formally warned that the measure conflicts with EU law, and the Health Ministry appears to have skipped a notification step EU rules require before such restrictions can be enacted.

The cannabis provisions sit inside an omnibus health bill that Health Minister Adonis Georgiadis tabled in the Hellenic Parliament on May 5, 2026 after a public consultation that closed April 27. The bill drew 845 comments overall; roughly half were directed at the cannabis chapter alone.

What the bill would do

Article 41 of the bill raises the legal THC threshold for industrial hemp from 0.2% to 0.3%, aligning Greece with the wider EU agricultural ceiling. But the same article carves dried flower out of the existing exemption for raw harvested hemp products. Retail sale, distribution, supply, purchase and use of hemp flower inside Greek territory would be “totally prohibited,” even when THC stays within the 0.3% limit.

Import, storage and wholesale supply of the same flower would remain permitted, but only for industrial processing into cosmetics, foods and dietary supplements. Operators trading flower outside that narrow channel would face €100,000 fines, six-month suspension of their operating licence, and prison sentences of up to five years.

Other provisions move in a more permissive direction for the medical channel. Article 42 cuts the EOF application fee for modifications and renewals of pharmaceutical cannabis export-production licences from €2,500 to €500. Articles 45 to 49 create a new class of licensed cannabis-product retailers — standalone stores at least 500 metres from schools, registered on a national Health Ministry digital registry, subject to inspection by Greece’s National Organisation for Medicines (EOF). Greece’s medical cannabis programme is left untouched.

The political pressure that produced the bill came from the rapid spread of synthetic and semi-synthetic cannabinoids, particularly HHC and its derivatives, sold at low-THC hemp-flower price points in convenience stores and vending machines. Greek authorities classified HHC as a narcotic in January 2024 and expanded the synthetic cannabinoid list in 2025, but enforcement has lagged behind the chemistry. Reporting in Greek press points to the hospitalisation of a Thessaloniki student on a school trip, after consuming a semi-synthetic cannabis product, as the case that crystallised the political moment.

Where it conflicts with EU law

Greece’s Economic and Social Committee (OKE), the statutory body that reviews draft laws before they reach parliament, examined Article 41 and concluded in its formal opinion that the blanket retail ban “moves against the European trend where CBD flower distribution is permitted under specific conditions” and “excessively restricts economic activity, squeezing an entire class of retail trade.” The committee recommended replacing the prohibition with enhanced supervision, age limits, traceability and substantially higher fines.

The EU-law overlay rests on the Court of Justice’s 2020 Kanavape ruling (Case C-663/18), which held that CBD extracted from the whole hemp plant is not a narcotic under EU or UN drug-control law and that member states cannot block CBD products lawfully marketed in another member state unless the restriction is appropriate and strictly necessary to protect public health. National measures that fail that proportionality test fall foul of the free-movement-of-goods rules in Articles 34 and 36 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

The most immediately actionable procedural argument available to Greek operators is a separate one. EU rules under Directive 2015/1535 require member states to notify the European Commission of draft technical regulations through the Technical Regulations Information System (TRIS) before enactment, triggering a mandatory standstill. Industry coverage that searched the TRIS database for Greek notifications across 2025 and 2026 turned up no entry covering the cannabis chapter of the bill. If the bill passes without that notification, any technical regulation in it can be challenged as unenforceable on procedural grounds alone, regardless of substance.

What operators should watch

The most consequential parallel proceeding is Italian. In November 2025, Italy’s Council of State referred its own hemp-flower ban — Decree-Law 48/2025, which reclassified hemp inflorescences as narcotics regardless of THC content — to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling. The two questions Italy’s court asked are essentially the questions Greek operators will need to litigate: whether EU agricultural law precludes a member-state ban on compliant hemp parts, and whether such a ban can be justified when THC content is minimal and scientific evidence of harm is absent.

A CJEU answer is, according to industry coverage of the referral, not expected before late 2026. Once delivered, the ruling would bind all 27 member states and would give Greek operators an immediate basis to challenge any enacted retail restriction in domestic courts without needing to begin a separate referral.

The Greek bill now moves to committee stage before a plenary vote. Because Article 41 sits inside a broader health bill whose headline provision — a Drug Innovation Fund — has its own political momentum, amendments targeted at the cannabis chapter alone require a specific political decision to disaggregate what the government bundled. That makes the path to a narrower, OKE-style supervisory regime harder than it would be on a standalone cannabis bill, even if the substantive argument for it is strong. Operators in Greece’s CBD retail sector — and counterparts in other EU member states watching member-state hemp policy diverge — should expect the substantive fight to play out in the courts, and the procedural fight to play out in Brussels through the missing TRIS notification, while Athens proceeds on its own timeline.