Matt Freemantle, Managing Director of Prohibition Partners – Interview Series

As both medical and recreational cannabis markets expand and innovative businesses emerge across numerous European countries, the need for large-scale events on par with MJBizCon and NECANN has become increasingly apparent. Luckily for European operators and business owners, these B2B-focused conventions and conferences are now taking place in major hub cities from Paris to Berlin. One such deeply informative event series for European operators is Cannabis Europa, with its most recent gathering held in London.

For a deeper look into European cannabis conventions and their importance for businesses navigating this new frontier, mycannabis.com had the pleasure of speaking with Matt Freemantle, Managing Director of Prohibition Partners.

How long did you serve in the Royal Navy and what did that teach you about both teamwork and team management?

I served for 4.5 years between 2003-2007 as an operator mechanic, which now feels like a whole other lifetime ago.

The Navy gets one thing right: team trust is built long before the pressure starts to show. You rehearse difficult tasks until nobody has to think about them anymore. Everyone trusts that the person next to them knows their role inside out because they have drilled that task together ad nauseam.

Events are somewhat similar, just with better catering, more drinks receptions and fewer uniforms. Obviously being on a warship is quite different from running a b2b conference! But as with the Navy, multiple small issues will arise on every single show day without exception. The question is never whether something happens, but whether the team already knows how to solve the problem before any delegates notice. 

While working with Absolute Radio and Global Radio, what were the most useful skills in media relations/PR that you learned and strengthened with those roles?

Pretty much my first role outside of the Navy was heading from Devon to London to work in advertising sales for two of the most popular radio station groups. That is not a career path that is particularly common.

I worked with huge media agencies across the city and with equally large clients, such as Unilever, Ford, and Adidas. I learned very quickly how to build strong relationships and their importance; you become a problem solver in a different way. An agency buyer comes to you with £100k to spend but needs to show their client they are getting the best deal possible. Oh, and the ads need to be on air tomorrow. In premium placements. That’s where your relationships both internally and externally are crucial to finding a way to make it work. If you don’t, next time the money will go elsewhere.

When you served as Events and Content Director for Funzing, what were the most noteworthy events/conferences that you planned and why? Who were some decorated people that served as speakers at those events?

I spent a couple of years there as a senior director, building the talks and experiences across eleven UK cities alongside the company co-founders. We ended up running around 1,500 talks over two years which sounds crazy, but we did it. Audiences ranged from fifty people upstairs in a pub to a thousand in a central London theatre.

Building Funzing Talks was enjoyable. You put a sought after academic in front of a general audience who paid to attend a social lecture on a Tuesday night in the back room of a pub in Shoreditch. That is actually a much harder test than a conference, where people are expensing it anyway, because the curation and detail must be on point. If the content is not genuinely good, nobody comes back. The loss of trust is immediate.

My personal highlight by far was emceeing an evening with legendary explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes at an 800 capacity auditorium in Westminster. This was easily the most nerve wracking but rewarding thing I have ever done on stage.

What caught your professional interest about joining the Prohibition Partners team? How did your previous event planning experience influence your decision to join the team?

An events job right at the start of COVID? Obviously this peaked my attention immediately! I loved that Prohibition Partners was diving into a virtual conference with both feet and in some way we were all learning on the job. We had to turn a two thousand delegate live conference into a four day virtual event with more than 160 speakers. No one had really done this online before as far as I could see. It was ambitious and exciting. 

Most B2B events roles serve a very well-established industry. This was the opposite. It was all quite fresh and interesting. I had some experience working with academics in psychedelics and cannabis, but I had barely realised the scale of the industry and its global possibilities. Regulation, science, capital and public opinion were all moving at once, and rarely in the same direction.

The actual challenge was relatively familiar. Take specialist knowledge, make it useful to people who are not specialists, and build a programme people will pay for on content alone. Moving into B2B conferences also combined my sales experience with my passion for events leadership. It was a great fit.

As someone who’s planned and hosted many events, how is planning cannabis-centered events such as Cannabis Europa and Business of Cannabis different from the planning stages of other events?

The regulation moves faster than the agenda. We build a programme months out and the law shifts underneath it. Germany’s framework is the live example right now. So the content has to be built to flex, and the panel you announce in January might need reframing by April.

Marketing is genuinely harder than people expect. Paid advertising is restricted or even blocked outright on some major platforms. You end up doubling down on building your own audience and community because you cannot buy one, which is exactly why the media side of our business matters so much.

And the accuracy bar is higher. People in that room make market entry decisions based on what they hear on stage and who they meet on the expo floor. Europe is not one market, it is a cluster of separate legal regimes with different priorities. That can certainly keep you on your toes!

In the years that Cannabis Europa has been hosted, how have you seen the convention expand and evolve? With more European countries implementing different types of cannabis reform, has that caused the convention to grow in size?

The real change is not the size, it is the substance. The early years largely focused on whether meaningful reform would happen at all, which required a lot of advocacy and optimism. Now the conversation is pointedly commercial and clinical. While never forgetting the changing regulatory side of the discussion.

Reform has grown the numbers, but more importantly it changed who turns up. Pharma distributors, institutional capital and government delegations sitting next to the growers. Across our 2026 Cannabis Europa events we had nearly 1,500 attendees, 100-plus speakers and numerous new sponsors and exhibitors. It’s great to see new businesses and executives coming into the fold each year.

Of all the guests that attend Cannabis Europa and the Europe-based cannabis events you’ve planned, what countries are most represented over others? With Germany being one of the newest countries to legalize recreationally, how many German cannabis professionals usually attend those events?

The UK is consistently the biggest single group at around 43 per cent, which is expected when you run the flagship in London. Europe overall is about 70 per cent, North America close to 15. That latter number has grown little by little over the last 4-5 years and we expect it will continue to do so as more of the major U.S. and Canadian companies look for opportunities to expand.

Germany is the largest medical market in Europe by a distance. German attendees are around six to seven per cent of the room and climbing, which is why we now also run summits in Berlin and Frankfurt rather than expecting everyone to fly to London. The Cannabis Health Symposium in Frankfurt on November 4th is dedicated to German medical market regulations and the education for healthcare professionals there. It is going to be incredibly interesting to dive more deeply into the current state of play. We’ll be hosting telemedicine debates, scientific presentations, and essentially training sessions for prescribers. In London on November 26th too, by the way.

What in particular inspired you to create Growth Lab and what have been some of the most interesting discussions that Growth Lab has hosted? What subjects were mainly discussed?

I had spent years programming talks at Funzing, then moved to Barcelona and found there was nothing like it here. Plenty of tech meetups, business networking events, and free-to-attend sessions which were company pitches dressed up as something else. Very little where a proper academic gets an hour to explain what they actually work on to an engaged audience.

So I started it in May 2025. Wednesdays, roughly September through June, fifty to sixty people, one speaker, an hour plus questions, then drinks. Central Barcelona venues. There is nothing clever about the format and that is deliberate. It’s accessible education delivered by real experts.

What surprises people is how well the difficult subjects do. Trust and deception. Consciousness and AI. The gut-brain axis, which everyone has an opinion on and almost nobody has read anything about. It turns out there is a decent audience for the real version rather than the podcast version. I would love to host these in a few more cities in the future.

What are some exciting plans for the future of Prohibition Partners and the events that they organize? What are some possible future locations for events similar to Cannabis Europa?

Busy autumn. Cannabis Health Symposium in Frankfurt on 4 November and the UK edition at Conway Hall on 26 November, both of which push us further into the clinical and healthcare audience rather than purely trade. We are also launching Mind Forward with an inaugural symposium in London on December 1st—an evolution from our PSYCH Symposium which looks at innovations in mental health through the lens of tech, longevity and bio-tech rather than just psychedelic medicine. This is a really exciting project to work on. Not least because it will take place at Ministry of Sound.

Strategically we are not adding cities just to fill out a map. Berlin and Frankfurt exist because Germany has the volume and market movement.

In terms of future locations, Poland and France again make the most sense right now for 2027 as those markets mature and regulatory pipelines become more clear. Lisbon and Amsterdam both have a case. Lisbon in particular would be fantastic. Of course, we won’t be forgetting about London either which is very much our home base and will remain so.

Thank you for joining us, Matt! For more information on Prohibition Partners, please visit its website.