UK Medical Cannabis Market Doubles Again as Canada Dominates

The UK’s private medical cannabis market more than doubled its imports for a second straight year in 2025, taking in over 30,000 kilograms of cannabis-based products, according to new figures¹ from the research firm Prohibition Partners. The growth is running ahead of the industry’s own forecasts — and it is quietly redrawing the map of who supplies Britain’s patients and which operators get to keep their margins.

The numbers come from the firm’s UK Medical Cannabis Market Update 2026, released June 24, 2026, and build on UK Home Office customs data that MyCannabis first reported in May. Prohibition Partners estimates the patient base will expand by more than 40,000 over the course of 2026 and projects the market will approach a billion pounds in annual revenue within four years. Those are projections, not booked sales. But the import figures underneath them are hard customs records, and they are moving fast.

Alexander Khourdaji, a senior analyst at Prohibition Partners and the report’s lead author, said the UK had become “one of the fastest-growing medical cannabis markets anywhere in the world” in the space of two years, with Canadian supply now behind the vast majority of what British patients are prescribed.

Canada takes over the supply chain

The most consequential shift is in where the product comes from. Canadian flower shipments to the UK grew more than 560% in a single year, the report found. Once cannabis re-routed through European processing hubs such as Portugal is counted, Prohibition Partners estimates Canada now accounts for 70% to 80% of everything entering the UK — a figure it concedes is well above what official Home Office data shows on its face, because customs records log the country a shipment was processed and exported from, not where the plant was grown.

That modeled estimate, rather than the raw import line, is the report’s central claim, and it names a clear loser: the European middlemen. Spain, whose licensed growers are still winning fresh export clearances, supplied more than half of Britain’s medical cannabis as recently as 2023; by the end of 2025 its share had collapsed to roughly 11%, the firm said. Australia and North Macedonia saw comparable declines, as Canadian producers — sitting on excess capacity, thin domestic margins and aggressive export strategies — ship bulk flower directly from their own EU-GMP facilities instead of paying a continental processor to handle it first.

Domestic UK cultivation remains a sliver — about 14% of supply, by the report’s estimate — and Prohibition Partners expects that share to shrink rather than grow, because imports are scaling faster than British growers can.

Falling prices, uneven winners

All that new supply is doing what new supply does: pushing prices down. The firm found the average price of medical cannabis flower fell over the past year and projects further declines through 2030, while vape prices dropped more than 20% in the ten months to March 2026. The number of distinct products on offer to patients more than doubled between April 2025 and March 2026, though dried flower still makes up roughly 80% of the catalogue.

For operators, the report is blunt about who absorbs the squeeze. Companies that can perform the final manufacturing and quality-control step in-house — converting bulk imported flower into pharmacy-ready, dispensable product — are best placed to defend their margins. Those that outsource that step face mounting pressure as per-gram prices compress. It is a familiar vertical-integration story: as a commodity market matures and prices fall, value migrates to whoever controls processing and distribution rather than whoever simply holds an import licence. Curaleaf’s recent deal to bring a Portuguese brand back to the UK through its own Sunderland manufacturing line fits the pattern.

The regulatory wild card

The market’s vulnerability is not supply — it is access. The report estimates roughly 80% of UK prescriptions now flow through fewer than a dozen telemedicine platforms, a concentration that mirrors prescriber data showing a small group of doctors writing most of England’s cannabis scripts. The same efficiency that built the market so quickly is also where it is most exposed.

The Care Quality Commission has flagged concerns about oversight and prescribing consistency at some private clinics, and the report expects the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs to formally review the UK’s medical cannabis framework in 2026 or 2027, with telemedicine prescribing a likely focus. Prohibition Partners points to Poland, where a late-2024 restriction on online-first consultations sent prescription volumes sharply lower before they slowly recovered. By the firm’s own account, a comparable tightening in Britain is the single variable most capable of knocking its growth forecast off course.

The UK has built one of the world’s fastest-growing medical cannabis markets almost entirely outside the NHS, on private prescriptions and imported flower routed through a thicket of Home Office import licences. The 2025 customs data shows that machine running harder than its own architects expected. Whether it keeps that pace now depends less on patient demand than on what regulators decide to do about how the prescriptions get written.

References:

^{1. Prohibition Partners, “UK Medical Cannabis Market Update 2026” (2026). https://prohibitionpartners.com/reports/}