UK Medical Cannabis Imports Double as Canadian Producers Bypass Europe

UK medical cannabis flower imports doubled again in 2025, reaching 30,062kg for the year after coming in at 14,992kg in 2024 — but the more revealing number in the latest Home Office data is the one that explains how the market got there. Canadian producers shipped 17,067kg directly to the UK in 2025, more than six times the 2,578kg they sent the year before, as licensed producers bypassed the European processors that had long captured a layer of the supply chain between Canadian cultivation and British pharmacies.

The figures come from a Freedom of Information request to the UK Home Office, dated April 10, 2026, covering dried cannabis flower preparations classified as unlicensed specials. The dataset excludes extract products, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and imports from the Crown Dependencies. The 2025 totals remain provisional pending the International Narcotics Control Board’s annual reporting process, which closes June 30, 2026.

The shift is a supply chain story. For years, most Canadian medical cannabis reaching the UK traveled an indirect route: Canadian producers exported bulk flower to processors in Spain, Portugal, or Germany, where it was finished, packaged, and certified under EU Good Manufacturing Practice standards before re-export to British importers. As more Canadian-licensed producers secured EU-GMP certification for their domestic facilities, that processing step became optional — and the cost and margin associated with it shifted in-house.

Inside the Acceleration

The intra-year trajectory makes the structural shift clearer than the annual totals do. UK imports started 2025 at 5,285kg in the first quarter and closed at 11,810kg in the fourth — a 123% increase across four quarters. Direct Canadian shipments accounted for 7,839kg of that fourth-quarter figure alone, meaning Canada’s direct volumes in Q4 2025 were approaching what the entire UK market consumed in 2023 on an adjusted basis.

Alex Khourdaji, lead analyst at market research firm Prohibition Partners — which secured the FOI data alongside the publication that first reported it — attributed the pattern to a change in how procurement is being handled: “The data suggests a move from incremental, clinic-led growth to larger, wholesale-driven procurement cycles and stronger inventory build-ups towards the end of the year.” That framing is consistent with what Canadian producers have been communicating in financial filings and on earnings calls: tight domestic margins, significant production capacity, and pharmaceutical export markets where pricing holds at levels that make international volumes economically rational.

A note on the 2023 baseline: raw Home Office data shows 26,973kg total for that year, which would overstate the market’s trajectory. Almost all of that volume came from two near-identical 10,056kg shipments from Finland in the first half of 2023, after which Finnish imports disappeared entirely from the records. Since Finland does not operate as a medical cannabis exporter, Prohibition Partners excluded those volumes from its analysis, leaving an adjusted 2023 baseline of approximately 6,860kg. The picture that emerges is a market that has roughly doubled for two consecutive years.

Who’s Losing Ground

The data shows what Canada’s direct-to-UK strategy is costing the European processors. Spain had been the UK’s dominant medical cannabis supplier since 2021, primarily as a re-exporter of Canadian and other third-country products, and shipped 1,591kg in the first quarter of 2025. By the fourth quarter, Spanish shipments had fallen to 161kg. Spain’s full-year 2025 total of 3,417kg represented 11.4% of UK imports.

Germany’s re-exports to the UK fell from 1,963kg in 2024 to 1,404kg in 2025. Portugal moved the other direction — growing from 2,466kg in 2024 to 3,971kg in 2025 — though a meaningful share of Portuguese export volumes still reflects Canadian-origin material processed through certified Portuguese facilities rather than domestically cultivated product. Portugal is partly absorbing what Spain is losing, but through a different mechanism.

Outside Canada and Portugal, South Africa showed the strongest growth among suppliers, rising from 421kg in 2024 to 1,345kg in 2025. Three countries shipped medical cannabis flower to the UK for the first time in 2025: Switzerland (354kg), the Czech Republic (142kg), and Greece (105kg). The source-country count expanded from 11 to 14, reflecting a broadening supply base even as Canadian direct shipments dominate the volume.

The Forward Read

The fourth-quarter run rate of 11,810kg, annualized, implies approximately 47,000kg in 2026 — more than 50% above the full-year 2025 figure. Whether that trajectory holds depends on whether the large wholesale procurement patterns of the second half of 2025 represent a durable structural shift or an inventory build ahead of anticipated demand. The UK market’s fundamentals support continued growth. Prohibition Partners estimates the UK medical cannabis market reached approximately $298 million in value in 2025, with around 80,000 patients receiving treatment through the private prescribing system by year-end. While a small number of domestic producers — including those who secured manufacturing authorizations from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency — supply the market, the UK relies on imports for the vast majority of its supply; the country has no commercial-scale cultivation infrastructure comparable to that of Germany or Australia.

Khourdaji framed the underlying supply push in structural terms: Canadian producers are moving on “excess production, tight domestic margins and Canadian licensed producers’ international expansion strategies.” For those exporters, the UK increasingly functions as one of the few markets outside Germany large enough to absorb significant volumes at pharmaceutical pricing. Rubicon Organics recently secured approval for its Cascadia brand for international medical cannabis — an example of the certification work that underpins the direct-shipping routes now displacing European processors. The question the 2025 data raises is whether the processors can adapt, or whether the corridor that ran from Canadian farms through Spanish and German packaging lines is being routed around permanently.