This report from CannaReporter, published on 4 July 2025

The two-day conference at the Barbican in the UK capital addressed a number of other issues relating to the global cannabis market that could redefine policies and regulations for the plant in Europe in the coming years. However, it was clear that there are a number of problems common to all countries that have regulated medicinal cannabis in one way or another:

• the difficulty of access for patients,

• the need for training for doctors,

• the updating of academic curricula,

• the inclusion of pharmacovigilance in the area, and

• the standardisation of regulations at European level.

There seems to be general agreement in the industry that all countries and medical cannabis companies would benefit from common laws and regulations across all Member States, as disparate regulations add confusion and bureaucracy to an area that, despite being innovative, is already fraught with challenges.

Educating the Medical Community on Cannabis is Essential

Several speakers, including Liam McGreevy, CEO of VOR Group, stressed that “it is important to learn from the experience of other countries, such as Germany”, because “the market is changing, with Germany leading the way”. McGreevy also noted that “there is an increasing demand, the supply network is becoming more consistent and there are more and more doctors and more patients.”

Recalling that, in Israel, any patient suffering from cancer, for example, can have access to cannabis as a first-line medicine, Niall Ivers, from Cantourage, said that “educating the medical community is essential to understand the potential of the plant”, because it “will not continue to be a medicine different from others and pharmacovigilance must be carried out as with other medicines. But do patients have more knowledge than doctors?”, he asked.

As long as textbooks and schools of medicine and pharmacy continue to ignore cannabis and the endocannabinoid system, patients will likely have a higher level of knowledge than healthcare professionals, as users learn from their own experience when they seek solutions beyond the doctor's office in the hope of finding something that can alleviate their ailments.

The Endocannabinoid System (ECS) is nothing new. CB1 receptors were first identified 27 years ago (in 1988) by Professor Raphael Mechoulam, an Israeli chemist considered the “father” of cannabinoid science, quickly leading to the discovery of this complex system that plays a key role in the homeostasis of our body. Dand according to the article “The Endocannabinoid System: Essential and Mysterious”, published by physician Peter Grinspoon at Harvard Health Publishing, “The ECS regulates and controls many of our most critical bodily functions, such as learning and memory, emotional processing, sleep, temperature control, pain control, inflammatory and immune responses, and feeding.” This system, he explains, “is currently at the center of international research and drug development.”

How do doctors even begin to prescribe medical cannabis when they don’t know what it does?

Eidan Havas, founder of the Australian distributor Entourage Effect, said that doctors need to be given more support so that they can be more confident in their prescriptions: “2,000 [cannabis] products in Australia make life difficult for doctors — and we can’t have a system where the patient tells the doctor what to prescribe.”

If that’s the way forward, he asked, “how will people be able to trust doctors?” Havas warned: “We have to be politically correct about this, there are many forms, many varieties, but we have to be careful, otherwise there could be a loss of trust in the health system.”

Berta Kaguako, health and social assistance consultant at the holistic health platform EthLife, drew attention to “a serious problem that needs to be addressed”. As he explained, “we are currently losing patients to the illicit market and the consequences associated with being a patient are the crux of the issue. There is still so much work to be done with current patients… if we quickly scale to many more, it will be a disaster”, he predicted.

“The size of the market will always be determined by the desires of consumers”William Muecke, co-founder of Artemis Growth Partners

At the conference “From agreement to alignment: can Europe define what cannabis regulation should look like?”, William Muecke also mentioned educating doctors and pharmacists as a key step. But for the financial consultant and co-founder of Artemis Growth Partners, gathering data to identify problems and assess the best possible paths forward is essential.

“Activism wants to move very quickly, pharmaceuticals want to move very slowly, and this is a problem.”

According to Muecke, there are steps to follow that must be taken into account, so as not to fall into the same mistakes that are occurring in other markets: “we think that we should start with the medicinal market, then health & wellness [health and well-being] and then recreational use, because medicinal gives us data, safety and accountability and therefore should be step A before step B. Otherwise, Europe risks failing to learn from others’ mistakes to do things right. The US has lost its way… recreational has taken over everything and patients have been forgotten and abandoned. And it is not the market that has failed, but the regulators. It is important to look at the long-term opportunities of cannabis,” he said.

The fact that we don’t have a legal framework for the recreational market in Europe makes things more difficult.

“What’s great about the Netherlands is that 50 years of experience have shown that there are no serious consequences [after legalizing recreational cannabis]. But now they’re saying, ‘Let’s collect data that can prove what we already know.’ In the United States, as in Germany, they’ve only recently started collecting data, and from what we can see already, we know that having prices that allow consumers to move to the regulated market, as in Germany, is the best thing that can happen,” because, at the end of the day, “the size of the market will always be determined by the desire of the consumers,” Muecke said.

And with a wink to the pharmaceutical industry and regulators, he made his prediction: “Once they have access to a pill that they can take for their illness, I don’t think they’ll go back to the illegal market.”

One plant, three markets

When we talk about the “cannabis market,” what are we really talking about? For Will Muecke, there is “one plant and three markets: medicinal, recreational use, and industrial” — which only complicates things further. “Do we have to create specific definitions for these types of markets?” he asked.

Muecke, together with the members of the B2B platform Prohibition Partners, is one of the promoters of the Whitepaper out of Global Cannabis Regulatory Summit, organized by Artemis and Tenacious Labs, which took place in March on Capitol Hill in Washington DC, behind closed doors, for invited guests only and with no journalists allowed to attend.

The objective of the event was, according to the official website, “to promote relationships and partnerships between experts, cannabis industry leaders and international regulators, in order to foster the sharing of ideas in an effort to create momentum and strengthen pathways to establish a global cannabis economy.”

In this White Paper that resulted from the meeting and was released at another Cannabis Europe conference, a review of the state of the markets is made, as well as the challenges, causes and consequences of the current situation in the various countries, proposing some solutions to reform the legislation related to medicinal cannabis worldwide based on the motto “Putting Patients First”.

In the paper, Stephen Murphy, Alex Khourdaji and Lawrence Purkiss of Prohibition Partners outline the problems associated with the current cannabis market, explaining that “the number of countries participating in the international trade in medicinal cannabis is increasing, yet patient access remains restricted globally.”

They list that growth is often limited by factors such as “insufficient training or education for healthcare professionals, bureaucratic obstacles to obtaining and/or prescribing cannabis, institutional stigma around cannabis treatment, and the costs associated with these barriers.”

The global cannabis industry (medical and recreational sales) is estimated to be worth over US$ 2024 billion by 2038. The majority of sales are from recreational cannabis (70%), predominantly from North American markets. Medical cannabis sales account for approximately 30% of total global cannabis sales, with North America being the key region, followed by Europe and Oceania.