Does medicinal cannabis need a pharmaceutical rebrand?
Yesterday I attended Cannabis Europa at the Barbican in London. This is an annual conference focused on Europe’s medicinal cannabis industry held by Prohibition Partners (a B2B market intelligence and events business).
The overarching theme from panel discussions was that the nascent cannabis industry being built in Europe is different from the “wild west” one that has taken root in the US, where the line between medicinal and recreational use tends to be seen as little more than a bureaucratic formality. The European market is “a pure medical market”, Andreas Dotterweich, Senior Vice President for European Business at Aurora (one of the big global Canada-based cannabis producers), told me.
There is evidently truth to this, as most European countries have not legalised cannabis for recreational purposes, and medicinal use tends to be tightly controlled. In the UK medicinal cannabis was legalised in 2018, but it can only be prescribed by a specialist doctor for chronic conditions in cases where two other types of treatment have already been tried and failed.
Germany has gone down a more permissive route. Possession and home growing for recreational use was legalised in 2024, and there are fewer hoops you need to jump through to get a prescription for medicinal use.
Several digital health platforms have sprung up to make access as seamless as possible for Germans. Bloomwell, the largest of these, says it can get a prescription issued and product delivered in under 24 hours, without even needing to speak to a doctor in many cases. Conditions covered include sleep disorders, ADHD, migraines, chronic pain, and depression, as per Bloomwell’s website (an interview with them will be published shortly). The result is that about a million Germans are now being prescribed cannabis, most of whom are paying for it themselves, although the statutory insurer does reimburse it. This compares to tens of thousands in the UK.
Europe’s regulatory restrictions have prevented the “green rush” seen in the US, which may be seen as a good thing in the context of Europe’s industry trying to position itself as more serious and medically-driven. However, many speakers expressed frustration that stringent restrictions are preventing people who could benefit from medicinal cannabis from accessing it.
And investors may become impatient with the regulatory cap on the European market and take their capital elsewhere. “Governments need to lay out a longer term roadmap,” Claire Davey, Chief of Staff – Underwriting, at Relm Insurance (an insurer focused on providing coverage for emerging markets that are underserved by traditional insurers), said at a session entitled ‘Can Europe build a better cannabis industry than North America?’. “Investors will be put off if they can’t see regulatory certainty over the next 3–5 years.”
Tom Forrest, Co-Founder and Chief Development Officer of New Zealand-based cultivator Puro New Zealand, argued that, as well as the barriers to entry being too high (in the UK in particular) and the general lack of education amongst both doctors and patients (Reddit forums being primary way people find out about the benefits of medicinal cannabis is not great), the way medicinal cannabis is typically offered and consumed is the traditional cannabis flower to be vaped, which appeals to those who are “not cannabis naive”, but may appeal less to others. “As the market grows there will be a need for more products,” he said at a panel entitled ‘Beyond Flower: Is Europe’s medical cannabis market turning pharmaceutical?’.
“Cannabis has to look like medicine,” fellow panellist Hannah Bellmann, Medical Cannabis Lead at German specialty pharma company Medios Pharma, said. “I think this is also where the money is long-term. We’re still quite flower heavy.” However, she also said certain conditions will always need flower therapy, and there is a “good chance” cannabis extracts will also be accepted by patients.
An audience member asked whether the patient base would ever buy into a tablet-based form, to which Forrest responded “yes, as long as it has high efficacy”; for some patients this will even be the preferred consumption method.
Panellists also discussed something even more radical: whether the industry should move away from even referring to the products as “cannabis”. Gabriel Newman, CEO of Cantourage UK (one of the major UK suppliers), seemed to think there was something to this: we don’t refer to opioid pain-killers as “heroin-based products” after all!
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Martin De Benito Gellner or call 0207 183 3779.
