Curaleaf Targets UK’s Cannabis Prescriber Gap With Free Training

Curaleaf International has opened a free online training platform for UK doctors, pharmacists and other clinicians, aiming squarely at the tightest bottleneck in Britain’s fast-growing medical cannabis market — the small number of practitioners trained or confident enough to prescribe.

The company announced the launch on June 23, 2026. Its Curaleaf Education platform is free to join, open to any regulated clinician, and awards continuing professional development credit that doctors, consultants and pharmacists can apply retrospectively to work they have already done in the field. The company frames it as a rebuilt and expanded version of an education site it has run for years, rather than a brand-new launch.

The curriculum runs in three tiers: foundational science on cannabinoids and the body’s endocannabinoid system; core clinical material on formulations, safety and prescribing; and advanced modules covering pain, neurology and psychiatry. Curaleaf says the content draws on its UK Medical Cannabis Registry, which it describes as the largest clinical database of its kind, holding records from more than 55,000 patients. By the company’s count, the UK now has more than 60,000 medical cannabis patients; some industry estimates run higher still.

A market held back by its prescriber base

The gap Curaleaf is addressing is real, and it explains why the UK market looks the way it does. Cannabis-based medicines have been legal to prescribe since November 2018, but only specialist doctors on the General Medical Council’s register can start a patient on them — GPs cannot initiate a prescription. Industry data suggests that of roughly 100,000 eligible specialists, only around 180 actively prescribe, fewer than 1%.

That scarcity has produced a strikingly concentrated market, with a handful of high-volume clinicians writing the bulk of the country’s cannabis prescriptions, as MyCannabis reported in June 2026. On the NHS, prescribing of unlicensed cannabis products has been reported in single figures across seven years. The result is a private market that has scaled on patient demand while its pool of willing prescribers barely moved.

Curaleaf and others trace the problem back to medical training. Dr Simon Erridge, research director at the company’s clinic, said medical school curricula “haven’t caught up with the regulatory reality,” noting that the endocannabinoid system gets barely a mention in most medical degrees even though the medicines have been legal for years.

Why Curaleaf is the one teaching

For Curaleaf, closing that gap is also good business. The company sits across nearly every link of the UK supply chain: a Care Quality Commission-regulated clinic — the former Sapphire Clinics — an online pharmacy, and a Sunderland laboratory that manufactures and distributes medical cannabis to other prescribers and pharmacies. It is part of Curaleaf International, a subsidiary of US-listed Curaleaf Holdings.

Every clinician it trains and makes more comfortable prescribing widens the addressable market for the products Curaleaf itself supplies — from the novel dosage forms it manufactures to the overseas brands it distributes into Britain. That supply side has expanded quickly: UK medical cannabis imports roughly doubled in 2025.

The company is candid that education underpins that growth. “Education is the foundation of responsible access,” said Juan Martinez, chief executive of Curaleaf International, casting a better-trained prescriber pool as the basis for the market’s long-term growth. The platform is open to clinicians with no Curaleaf affiliation, and the company presents it as raising standards of care rather than steering prescriptions. The commercial logic is still plain: in a market where the binding constraint is prescriber confidence, the supplier that trains the prescribers stands to benefit.

It is not Curaleaf’s first move into clinician education. The company has run workshops, backed a CPD-accredited clinicians’ society and co-hosted training events for UK healthcare professionals over the past year. The relaunched platform folds that work into a single self-paced course built on its own prescribing data.

What to watch

Curaleaf says it plans to extend the platform to other international markets after the UK. The more telling measure will be domestic: whether the number of doctors actively prescribing — stuck near 180 for years — finally starts to climb. A free course lowers one barrier, but institutional caution, the absence of meaningful NHS reimbursement and restrictive national guidance all remain in place. Curaleaf has built the on-ramp; the market will show whether prescribers take it.