Portugal Medical Cannabis Outpaces 2025 Export Run Rate

LISBON – Portugal’s medicines regulator, Infarmed, has confirmed that the country exported 66,305 kilograms of medical Cannabis between January and June 2026, equivalent to more than 80% of everything it shipped in all of 2025. At that pace, the full year is on track to comfortably double the previous annual record.

The trajectory over the past three years tells the fuller story. Exports have risen sharply. In 2024, the amount exported almost tripled, from 11,973 kg to 31,188 kg. Full-year 2025 came in above 79 tons, already a record at the time. Each year has reset the benchmark, and 2026 is doing it again, decisively.

The European Union absorbs the bulk of Portuguese output. Germany, Spain, and Denmark are the leading destinations. Germany accounts for approximately 46% of Portugal’s exports, and the appetite has been voracious. Portugal shipped 55,164 kg to Germany in 2025, a 220% year-over-year increase, accelerated by surging medical demand following Germany’s partial Cannabis reform in 2024. Spain, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Australia fill out the remaining major markets.

On the regulatory side, Infarmed’s oversight has expanded alongside the sector. The agency completed 32 inspections of cultivation and manufacturing operations in H1 2026, with 27 targeting cultivation sites directly. Enforcement is getting sharper, too. Licenses have been suspended and revoked for non-compliance, with Cannacare among the licensees that lost its accreditation in March 2026. Forty-three entities currently hold cultivation and manufacturing authorization inside the country.

Prescription volumes at home are rising sharply as well. Infarmed recorded 5,413 prescriptions for authorized Cannabis-based preparations in H1 2026 alone; compared with 7,023 across all of 2025 and 4,143 for all of 2024. Portugal’s medical Cannabis framework was established under Law No. 33/2018, with eligible indications including chemotherapy-related nausea, certain HIV and hepatitis treatments, and Tourette syndrome. There is still no public reimbursement, leaving patients to cover costs entirely out of pocket.

That domestic gap remains the defining tension in the Portuguese model. A country producing pharmaceutical-grade Cannabis at European scale, shipping the overwhelming majority of it abroad, and keeping its own patients on a tight leash.

Portugal’s H1 2026 numbers confirm what the supply chain data has been signaling for some time – the export infrastructure is intact and accelerating. Police operations disrupted the industry in 2025, briefly ceding ground in the German market to competitors. Portugal recovered, and then some. The more substantive question going forward is how Infarmed’s tightening enforcement posture reshapes the competitive field for smaller licensed operators, and how long the gap between Portugal’s industrial export ambitions and its domestic access reality can hold before reform pressure forces a reckoning.